For three decades, authors scribbled away with the spectre of the Bad Sex Award judges looking over their shoulder. The award — run by the small Soho-based magazine Literary Review — names and shames writers for “redundant, poorly written or unnecessarily pornographic descriptions of sex in fiction”. It became so notorious that the winner is now breathlessly reported in the New York Times.
As well as being a bit of fun, the Bad Sex Award has served as a guarantor of standards in literature and left even the most pompous writers red-faced.
