British writer Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, is this year's winner of Bad Sex in Fiction Prize. She was handed over a bottle of champagne and a plaster foot (which, apparently, is supposed to be "an abstract representation of sex") at London's appropriately named In and Out Club.
The Literary ReviewBad Sex award was set up by the literary critic Rhoda Koenig and the late editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, in 1993 " to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature, and is limited to the literary novel".
It may have been started with the lofty aim of "gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels," but over the years, the award has created enough of a buzz around it.
"All the passages this year are equally awful, but Rachel Johnson's struck us because of the mixture of cliche and euphemism," Literary Review's deputy editor, Tom Fleming said. "There were a couple of really bad animal metaphors in there."
Source: Outlook
