Melvyn Bragg, Alan Titchmarsh, Tom Wolfe, AA Gill and Giles Coren are among previous winners. Past nominees also include Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Theroux, John Updike and Salman Rushdie.
So I wasn’t too ashamed when page 46 of my first novel – Twenty Something – was shortlisted this week alongside the likes of Will Self, David Mitchell and Mark Haddon. Surely I wouldn’t win.
And, in any case, writing about sex is rather more technical, and less fun, than doing it. Either you descend into flowery metaphor or you indulge in the “naming of parts”.
Both are more likely to be laughable than erotic. Many of the extracts on this year’s shortlist are unprintable in a family newspaper.
But I did enjoy David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green: “If Dawn Madden’s breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie’s got two Space Hoppers… she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily.”
Elsewhere, characters variously “mewl with pleasure” during the throes of passion. One is suddenly reminded of the “ease with which she milked her first cow”. Another sees erotic potential in a spaniel. And, at the end of a long extract, a man sighs as he feels “the welcome gust of his second wind”.
My own extract, in comparison, felt rather tame. But it was very badly written indeed. So bad, it seems, that the judges had little difficulty in declaring me, dear reader, the recipient of the 2006 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
I blush to read my offending prose now: “I can feel her breasts against her chest. I cup my hands round her face and start to kiss her properly. She slides one of her slender legs in between mine.
“Oh Jack, she was moaning now, her curves pushed up against me, her crotch taut against my bulging trousers, her hands gripping fistfuls of my hair.
“She reaches for my belt. I groan too, in expectation. And then I’m inside her, and everything is pure white as we’re lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.”
Apparently, the judges wriggled with mirth at the image of “bulging trousers”. I don’t blame them. Shamefully, it could have been even worse.
I struck out an entire extra page of the scene after a friend read the draft and said she would never look at me in the same way again. Self-editing came into play. What would my ex-girlfriends think? Or my parents?
Read more at the UK Telegraph
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