Alert! Wilbur Smith has been nominated for a rather awkward literary award – The 22nd Bad Sex in Fiction Award. He is facing some, uhm, stiff competition as he is shortlisted alongside eminent authors such as Richard Flanagan, Haruki Murakami, Ben Okri and Michael Cunningham.
These books are up for the dreaded award:
The magazine responsible for this special prize, Literary Review, writes: “The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.”
They have been tweeting snippets from the passages which earned these ten authors a spot on the 2014 list. Follow the hashtag #badsex to see some of the colourful responses:
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This is a distinguished list of nominees, including the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize (Richard Flanagan), as well as a previous winner (Ben Okri), a former winner of the Pulitzer Prize (Michael Cunningham), a perennially tipped favourite for the Nobel Prize (Haruki Murakami) and a prominent BBC journalist (Kirsty Wark). The judges also considered Andrew Marr’s Head of State, which started arrestingly – ‘they bucked like deer and squirmed like eels. And after that, vice-versa’ – but failed to sustain its early promise.
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Book details
- The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham
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EAN: 9780374266325
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- The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
EAN: 9780701189051
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- The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt
EAN: 9781590516492
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- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
EAN: 9781846558337
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- The Age Of Magic by Ben Okri
EAN: 9781784081478
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- The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd
EAN: 9781250041296
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- Desert God by Wilbur Smith
EAN: 9780007535651
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- Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan
EAN: 9781909585010
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- The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh
EAN: 9781472212085
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- The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark
EAN: 9781444777604
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