Rowan Somerville beats Alastair Campbell to win Bad Sex in Fiction Award
By ANITuesday, November 30, 2010
LONDON - Irish author Rowan Somerville has landed this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
He has narrowly beaten the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell to win the award, reports the Telegraph.
Somerville was crowned overall winner of the prize, which celebrates crude or outlandish sexual passages in modern literature, for his second novel, The Shape of Her.
He also beat the American novelist Jonathan Franzen, who was nominated for Freedom, and the Austrialian author Christos Tsiolkas, whose novel The Slap was long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
The judges said they were particularly taken with Somerville’s sentence: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”
Other amorous passages in The Shape of Her contained a female body part “upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing the night” and described how one character “twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself”.
Somerville was presented with the 18th annual Bad Sex award by Michael Winner, the film director, at a lavish ceremony in London. (ANI)
