The Bookseller.com

17th May 2008

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Authors in Bad Sex award

22.11.07

Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, Iain Banks, Norman Mailer and David Thewlis are all in line for this year's Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Passages from Winterson's The Stone Gods, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy, among others, were all deemed to qualify. The prize aims 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."

The winner will be announced on 27th November, when the passages will be read by two actresses. If the winning novelist fails to turn up, he or she will be represented by an actor or actress. Last year's prize was presented by Courtney Love to first-time author Iain Hollingshead.

The longlist in full:
Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (Hamish Hamilton)

Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (Cape)

Richard Milward's Apples (Faber)

Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy (Canongate)

Maria Peura's At the Edge of Light (Maia)

James Delingpole's Coward on the Beach (Bloomsbury)

David Thewlis's The Late Hector Kipling (Picador)

Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest (Little, Brown)

Quim Monzo's The Enormity of the Tragedy (Peter Owen)

Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (Granta)

Christopher Rush's Will (Beautiful Books)

Claire Clark's The Nature of Monsters (Viking)

Prize Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction