The Bad Sex Award 2008

British writer Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, is this year's winner of Bad Sex in Fiction Prize. She was handed over a bottle of champagne and a plaster foot(which, apparently, is supposed to be "an abstract representation of sex")at London's appropriately named In and Out Club.

The Literary Review Bad Sex award was set up by the literary critic Rhoda Koenig and the late editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, in 1993 " to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature, and is limited to the literary novel".

It may have been started with the lofty aim of "gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literarynovels," but over the years, the award has created enough of a buzz aroundit.

As the editors of Literary Review pointed out, John Updike, forexample, has been shortlisted for the prize four times in its 16-year history. "Good sex or bad sex, he has kept us entertained for manyyears. The 76-year-old American novelist was a finalist for this year's Bad Sex prize for his description of an explosive oral encounter in his latest book.

"All the passages this year are equally awful, but Rachel Johnson's struck us because of the mixture of cliche and euphemism," Literary Review's deputy editor, Tom Fleming said. "There were a couple of really bad animal metaphors in there."

Johnson took it in good humour: "I'm not feeling remotely grumpy about it. I know that men with literary reputations to polish might find itinsulting, but if you've had a book published in the year any attention is welcome, even if it's slightly dubious attention of this sort....I always wanted to win a literary award and to bag this coveted prize -- a prize that has been won by admired giants such as Norman Mailer, Sebastian Faulks and Tom Wolfe -- is, for me at least, a tremendoushonour."

Earlier, Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review had pointed out thatthere was quite a lot of variation in this year's shortlist in terms of how, exactly, the sex was bad.The entries, he said, covered the full gamut from weeping orifices and blue veins to sex between wolves."There are some which take the sex far too seriously, like Coelho, and some which have a grating change of register, like Buchan, and others that are just slightlyridiculous." He also explained why and how former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's spin doctor Alistair Campbell,who incidentally ended up on this year's list. "The Campbell seems quite Alastair Campbelly -- bad, in the slightly tortuous logical path the passage takes … and also, we wouldn't pass up the chance to put Alastair Campbell on a bad sex shortlist."

Norman Mailer was the first posthumous recipient of the Awardin 2007 for his last book, The Castle in the Forest, an unorthodox family saga about the birth and life of AdolfHitler.

JM comes over and pushes me gently back down on the fake fur. I try to rise up to kiss him – it's so lovely, the kissing – but he pushes me down, again. He likes to kiss me all over before he does anything else. He starts with my eyes, and plants a tender kiss on each lid.

… He moves on to my ears, a kiss that makes my nipples stand erect, and me emit little moans that drown out to my own ears the loud, distracting sound of Cumberbatch swiping dock leaves and tearing nettles and long grasses very close to the rickety stoop.

JM's hands are caressing my breasts, now, and I am allowed to kiss him back, but not for long, for he breaks off, to give each breast the attention it deserves. As he nibbles and pulls with his mouth, his hands find my bush, and with light fingers he flutters about there, as if he is a moth caught inside a lampshade.

Almost screaming after five agonizingly pleasurable minutes, I make a grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside, but he holds both by arms down, and puts his tongue to my core, like a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop. I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me. I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance or whatever it is.

© Rachel Johnson

The Widows of Eastwick for the following short listed passage

'[...] Do you want to see my vagina? Have you ever looked at one?'

'Of course.'

'Why 'of course'? Many men haven't. Straight men. They're scared to. It's the Medusa's head, that turns them to stone. Uh-oh. You're losing your stoniness. I guess you're not ready to think about vaginas yet.'

'No. I am. I'll get ready. But - '

'I know, darling. I know.'

She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn't know what name to call her. 'Mrs Rougement' was the name he had always known her by. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea. The rhythmic relentless shushing returned to their ears. She laid her head on the pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism. Having got rid of it, there was an aftermath of sorrow in which he needed to be alone; but there was no getting rid of her. 'Call me Sukie,' she said, having read his mind. 'I sucked your cock.'

'You sure did. Thanks. Wow.'

Click here to see his shortlisted passage for 2005,2003

All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell

[...] So now here he was, in the cold autumn air, and stuck-up Rosalie from Lavender Park Avenue was yanking her hand up and down his penis, he was clutching her knickers, and all he really knew was that he had to get his penis to where the knickers had been and hope for the best. It was too cold, and possibly even a bit damp, to get down on the ground, but he had never seen a film in which the love scene took place on an oddly shaped park bench with intricate metalwork at either end. He stuffed Rosalie's knickers into his pocket, and while her right hand continued to play with his penis, his moved down to pubic hair which felt very different to his, crinkly rather than soft. He worried she might resist as he started to push his hand hard between her legs, but she was making little purring noises that made him think he was doing fine. He levered himself up, pushed her skirt up and tried to roll his chest onto hers, trailing his legs behind him.

'Ow,' she said, as her back dug into the bench, and her arm brushed the metalwork.

'Oh, sorry. Are you OK?'

She wriggled her back into a more comfortable position, pulled his head towards her and as they kissed, he manoeuvred his body into what he assumed to be the right place. He wasn't sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled round it once more, and she pulled him towards her, it felt right. Then as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure that he was losing his virginity. He didn't know, technically, whether loss of virginity related to penetration only, or whether it required a climax. Either way, one appeared to be completed and the other was not far away. It was then that his problems started. He climaxed, trying not to make too much noise for fear of passers-by seeing them, and as he finished, Rosalie began to punch his back, then his chest, shouting 'off, off, off', and he was deeply confused. He had had his first orgasm inside a woman, who until a moment ago appeared to be a consenting partner in this but now, immediately post-orgasm, was trying to banish him. He felt this would be one of those moments that would stay with him for some time, even qualify as one of the final thoughts flashing through his mind on his deathbed. He pulled away from her, at which point she stood up, brushed herself down and ran away, leaving him alone with his rapidly softening penis, her knickers in his pocket, and a worry about what he had done wrong, and how he was going to explain being late home for dinner.

© Alastair Campbell

Brida by Paulo Coelho

Brida kissed him. She felt the taste of his mouth, the touch of his tongue. She was aware of every movement and sensed that he was feeling exactly the same, because the Tradition of the Sun always reveals itself to those who look at the world as if they were seeing it for the first time.

'I want to make love with you right here, Lorens.'

Various thoughts flashed through his mind: they were on a public footpath, someone might come by, some other person crazy enough to visit this place in the middle of winter. But anyone crazy enough to do so would also be able to understand that certain forces, once set in motion, cannot be interrupted.

He slipped his hands under her sweater and stroked her breasts. Brida surrendered herself entirely. The forces of the world were penetrating her five senses and these were becoming transformed into an overwhelming energy. They lay down on the ground between the rock, the precipice and the sea, between the life of the seagulls flying up above and the death of the stones beneath. And they began, fearlessly, to make love, because God protects the innocent.

They no longer felt the cold. Their blood was flowing so fast in their veins that she tore off some of her clothes and so did he. There was no more pain; knees and back were pressed into the stony ground, but that became part of their pleasure, completing it. Brida knew that she was close to orgasm, but it was still a very remote feeling, because she was entirely connected to the world: her body and Lorens' body mingled with the sea and the stones, with life and death. She remained in that state for as long as possible, while some part of her was vaguely conscious that she was doing things she had never done before. What she was feeling, though, was the bringing together once more of herself and the meaning of life; it was a return to the garden of Eden; it was the moment when Eve was reabsorbed into Adam's body and the two halves became Creation.

At last, she could no longer control the world around her, her five senses seemed to break free and she wasn't strong enough to hold on to them. As if struck by a sacred bolt of lightning, she unleashed them, and the world, the seagulls, the taste of salt, the hard earth, the smell of the sea, the clouds, all disappeared, and in their place appeared a vast golden light, which grew and grew until it touched the most distant star in the galaxy.

© Paulo Coelho

Attachment by Isabel Fonseca

They stopped and looked at each other with no message exchanged, no corny smolder, and for this Jean was grateful. She closed her eyes like pulling down the blinds and Dan picked her up, her legs instantly lifting to wrap around him, and carried her not to his bed but to the long lacquered table.

He placed her carefully like a large terra-cotta urn and skillfully set about his work, as concentrated as a specialist restorer focused on her intricate finish, as if she wasn't even there. A tug here and the top of her dress fell to her waist. He tilted her head back to get under her chin, and his thumbs on her jaw and her throat and her chest moved swiftly, smoothing the skin as if it was quick-drying clay.

[... He] kissed her about her ears. She didn't know about having her ears kissed - how it pulled like a drawstring threaded right through you, teasing, tightening, bringing you in. With each nuzzling kiss the line extended over other parts of her body, gathering into a new constellation of improbable shapeliness - Archer, Boar, Mermaid - another point from among her scatter of solitary stars. His wide hands now completely covered her breasts and with that wolfish smile, he yanked her bra down, forgetting the fiddly hooks - such attractive, hungry, butterfingered frustration.

The Gate of Air by James Buchan

She stood in the afternoon light, as if the light was coming from her own body, from her breast and eyes and where her dress had been [...] Jim ached with her nakedness. His arms and legs were as lifeless as fallen branches. He understood that love was a power and force of a different order from anything else beneath the sky, and could demolish not merely family relations or notions of right and wrong but also what was real and what was not. Jim's world had been knocked a little out of its axis, and would not be restored.

She turned to him. Her face had taken on her nudity or rather had shed a veil it wore for the world. She said:

'Perhaps you'd like to take off your shorts.'

'Do I have to?'

'I think you do.'

He felt that if he touched her breast she might be brought down to earth. He touched the round breast and hard bead at its tip. He felt something else fall from her, like a garment, as she leaned one knee on the bed. Light billowed out of her, and warmth in damp gusts as if from a garden after a rainstorm. She did not seem to be a woman, but something altogether stronger and sweeter. A darkness engulfed him, like a wave breaking over him in the sea shallows, and when he opened his stinging eyes he saw her pretty face before him.

'What about your husband?'

'Sod him.' She seemed to have forgotten she had one.

Jim felt strong, and handsome, and armed to the teeth. He felt like a barefoot runner, a wrestler, a charioteer. He felt his childhood receding from him, and he felt not the smallest regret. No more the poor fatherless orphan for him! He was an outlaw and all the better for it!

© James Buchan

Sashenka by Simon Montefiore

Inside, the room was dark, lit only by the lurid scarlet of the electric stars atop each of the eight spires of the Kremlin outside the window. They backed on to a bed that sagged in the middle, the sheets rancid with what she later identified as old sperm and alcohol in a cocktail specially mixed for Soviet hotels. She wanted to struggle, to reprimand, to complain, but he grabbed her face and kissed her so forcefully that a lick of flame burned her to the core.

His hands pulled her dress off her shoulders and he buried his face in her neck, then her hair, scooping up between her legs. He pulled down her brassiere, cupping her breasts, sighing in bliss. 'The blue veins are divine,' he whispered. At that moment, a lifetime of unease about this ugly feature of her body was replaced with satisfaction. He licked them, circling her nipples hungrily. Then he disappeared up her skirt.

She pushed him away from there, once, then twice. But he kept returning. She slapped his mouth, quite hard, but he didn't care.

'No, no, not there, come on, no thank you, no...' She cringed, closing her eyes bashfully.

'You're beautiful,' he said.

Could that be true? Yes, he insisted and he swiped her with his tongue. No one had ever done this to her before. She shivered, barely able to control herself.

'Lovely!' he said.

She was so ashamed she actually hid her face in her hands. 'Just don't!'

'See if you can pretend it isn't happening!' was his suggestion as he buried his face in her. When she finally looked down, he peered back at her, laughing. I've got a lover, she thought, incredulous. His irrepressible carnality enthralled her. It was like the first time with her husband, her only other lover – but then it was not like that at all. In fact, she reflected, this is me losing my real virginity at the hands of this infernal, lovable, Jewish clown who is so unlike any of the macho Bolsheviks in my life.

He's a madman, she thought as he made love to her again. Oh my God, after twenty years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy!

He eased out of her again, showing himself.

'Look!' he whispered as she did. Was this really her? There he was between her legs again, doing the most absurd, lovely things to places behind her knees, the muscle at the very top of her thighs, her ears, the middle of her back. But the kissing, just the kissing, was heavenly […] He made her forget she was a Communist.

© Simon Montefiore

To Love, Honour and Betray by Kathy Lette

Sebastian was lying across his bed with the blinds drawn wearing nothing but a towel, hands lazily laced behind his head as he watched the cricket on a small flickering television screen in the corner. His chest was the size of a South American country. A slanting tongue of lamplight lit up his lap and I could see the outline of his large appendage.

After agonizing for, oh, about two-fifths of a second, I straddled him on the bed, pinning his arms beside him with all my body weight. 'Remember what you said about chastity being curable if caught early enough?'

I kissed his mouth ravenously, devouring his neck, earlobes, chest. He broke free with muscular ease, unhooked my bra with composed expertise, found my nipple and flicked his tongue back and forth until it went hard. His towel fell away. Sebastian's erect member was so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town. I almost started directing traffic around it. He rolled me sideways on to my back and, in one flowing motion, my tracksuit and panties were down, lassoing one ankle.