Bad Sex in Fiction Awards: A Bit of Fun or Bad Taste?

Established in 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction award has been described as “the least desirable of literary prizes”. It is awarded to an author who has produced “an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” Its purpose is to discourage “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction” and in the past has been awarded to authors such as Sebastian Faulks and Giles Coren.

This year, the nominations included award-winning authors Ian McEwan and Eimar McBride, for their novels Nutshell and Lesser Bohemians. However, these failed to make the grade. Despite several nominations for Donald’s Trump’s ‘locker-room talk’, judges decided that this had to be discounted as the “award only covers fiction.”

The Bad Sex in Fiction award has been described as “the least desirable of literary prizes”

The 2016 shortlist features six authors, and includes New York Times bestselling author Gayle Forman, European Prize for Literature winner Erri De Luca and former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis. Authors Ethan Canin, Robert Seethaler and Tom Connolly also made it to the elite group.

Extracts from the selected novels can be read online, and include descriptions of “cows chewing grass” and “a brisk tennis game”. A spokesperson for the judges stated that the extracts commit the classic bad sex mistake of overwriting – with “mixed metaphors, uncomfortable similes, or becoming so hyperbolic they strain credulity”.

Extracts include descriptions of “cows chewing grass” and “a brisk tennis game”

In the past, nominees have often not attended the awards ceremony. Last year, winner David Morrissey failed to collect his prize. Morrissey, who won the award for his description of “the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation”, said that he felt it “best to maintain an indifferent distance…because there are too many good things in life to let these repulsive horrors pull you down.”

Morrissey is not alone; both Sebastian Faulks in 1998 and Tom Wolfe in 2004 did not attend the ceremony to collect their honour. Author Ben Okri, a nominee last year, also missed the prize giving, stating that “a writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it”.

Is it okay to have an award which many authors find insulting or offensive to receive a nomination for?

Perhaps the prize simply draws attention to the difficulties of writing scenes of a physically intimate nature, but with this in mind, it is worth questioning whether it is okay to have an award which many authors find insulting or offensive to receive a nomination for.

The prize could be said to be trivialising literary achievements, and parodying otherwise strong pieces of work. The fact that winners do not deem it worthy enough to even collect their award suggests that, instead of celebrating some of our most promising authors, we are turning their work into something which is to be laughed at.

It clearly is going to take a lot more than this to achieve its aim of putting an end to poorly written sex scenes in fiction

In supporting an award of this nature, are we undermining the achievements of both established and up-and-coming authors by highlighting something they have not done well? Given that the award is now in its twenty-third year, it clearly is going to take a lot more than this to achieve its aim of putting an end to poorly written sex scenes in fiction.