Take a bow, Rowan Somerville, you’ve written some spectacularly unsexy sex stuff. At least according to the Literary Review, which doles out an annual award to the worst sex writing in fiction. Somerville beat out authors Jonathan Franzen, Craig Raine, Adam Moss and a slew of others for his unappealing descriptions of sex in the novel The Shape of Her. The winning (losing) selection of prose? Somerville compared a sex act to “a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect.” Ouch. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award was founded in 1993, and highlights “the crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels.” Previous Bad Sex winners include Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and John Updike. [Yahoo]
