Londoner's Diary
With two weeks left of 2023, it seems the original organisers of the Bad Sex Award have finally given up on the prize. Traditionally given each year to the author of the worst depiction of sex in a novel, the Literary Review magazine's award has been on hiatus for four years. It has been put in jeopardy by an apparent dearth of bad sex writing in recent literature and despite hopes for a return, encouraged by this newspaper, no award shortlist has been announced.
A source among the judging panel told the Londoner that bringing the award back was "still under consideration" up until late November. But it seems the time has now passed. Another publication might conceivably take up the mantle.
The Literary Review has run the award since 1993 when it was established by then-editor Auberon Waugh. Waugh, journalist and son of Brideshead Revisited writer Evelyn Waugh, established the award in order to “highlight and gently discourage redundant, poorly written or unnecessarily pornographic descriptions of sex in fiction”.
The award ceremony is usually held in December at the appropriately named In And Out Club in St James’s Square, and the result makes waves in the literary world. But no booking was made at the club this year.
There hasn’t been a Bad Sex Award since 2019 when the pandemic intervened and judges decided that the public had been “subjected to too many bad things”.
Previous contenders for the award include Morrissey and former prime minister Tony Blair.
The judges usually stick to novels, but Blair nearly got a Bad Sex Award in 2010 for his memoir A Journey. The offending passage, about the night Labour leader John Smith died and he Blair decided to run to replace him: “That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told… I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead.”
Morrissey won in 2015 for his debut novel List of the Lost. Try putting this to music: “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”
