Food critic Coren wins British bad sex award

Friday December 2, 2005
Guardian Unlimited

It was the shower hose that clinched it. A passage from his debut novel, Winkler, describing a male character's genitalia as "leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath" won the 13th annual Literary Review award for Bad Sex in Fiction for food-critic-turned-novelist Giles Coren last night.

Coren beat off heavyweight competition for the prize with an unpunctuated 138-word description of coitus, followed by the two-word sentence, "like Zorro". Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paul Theroux and John Updike were among the 11 contenders for this year's prize, with Rushdie, Theroux and Updike all boasting previous nominations.

The prize was launched in 1993 by the late editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, in an attempt to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel". Winners of the award receive a statuette and a bottle of champagne - but only if they show up. While most do, last year's champion Tom Wolfe boycotted the ceremony, claiming that judges had failed to recognise the irony in a passage from his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons beginning "slither slither slither slither went the tongue".

Coren, however, seemed delighted with his win, and accepted his prize with aplomb from the Turner Prize-winning artist, Grayson Perry. Of the other shortlisted passages, he said "I wish I'd written them all."