Richard Flanagan, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize and well regarded novelists Haruki Murakami and Michael Cunningham are among the authors whose books are in contention for the 22nd Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Awarded by the Literary Review, the prize awards the “most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction”, and its purpose is to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them”. 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.

This year’s shortlist includes:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winner

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

The Snow Queen by Pulitzer prize winner Michael Cunningham

Desert God by Wilbur Smith

The Age of Magic by Ben Okri

The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd

The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh

The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark

Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan

The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt

The judges considered including Andrew Marr’s fiction debut Head of State in the shortlist, (it started arrestingly – ‘they bucked like deer and squirmed like eels. And after that, vice-versa’) but said it “failed to sustain its early promise”. It does only get 1* from four readers

 Last year the prize was won by Manil Suri for The City of Devi

The winner of the 2014 award will be announced on Wednesday 3rd December.