Bad Sex in Fiction Award

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Jonathan Littell won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the U.K.’s “most dreaded literary prize,” for his depiction of the sadomasochistic encounters between twin siblings in his World War II novel, “The Kindly Ones.”

The judges cited Littell for one incestuous scene that unfolds on the bed of a guillotine and another that invokes the myth of Cyclops, “whose single eye never blinks.” These marred what the judges called an impressive work.

“It is in part a work of genius,” the judges said in an e-mailed statement about the novel, which won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top book prize, in 2006.

Yet Littell clinched the Bad Sex award with one “mythologically inspired passage” and another that compared a sexual climax to “a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”