"It's always easy to find foolish descriptions of the sexual act, but they have to be funny as well," explained Auberon Waugh, editor-in-chief of the Literary Review, at the award ceremony of Bad Sex In Fiction for the year 2000.
"It's an enormous honour and I'm gratified," Sean Thomas said, after judges from the Literary Review declared that the remarkable coital descriptions in his second novel, Kissing England, were not only bad but astoundingly silly:
Kissing England by Sean Thomas (Flamingo)
It is time, time to fuck her. Now. Yes. Brupt, he rises, turns her over, flips her white body. Her smallwhite tidy body. She is so small and so compact, and yet she has all the necessary features... Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou are more compact and more
She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa.
Aiwa - She says, as he enters her slimy red-peppers-in-olive-oil cunt - Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh
"I knew I had a very good chance of winning it. I think mine was by far the most outrageous passage."
Thomas said his portrayal of sex was meant to be "provocative...funny and totally outrageous". He added, "I'm glad it's getting noticed, but this is a serious book about male identity and sexuality," he told the Times after receiving the award at the perhaps appropriately named In and Out Club in London.
The other nominees included John Updike for Gertrude & Claudius, Wendy Perriam, for Lying; Candida Clark, for The Constant Eye; Edward St Aubyn, for A Clue to the Exit; Wendy Holden, for Bad Heir Day.
