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.