The Bookseller.com

4th July 2009

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Bad Sex for Alastair Campbell

20.11.08 Katie Allen

Alastair Campbell's debut novel: All in the Mind (Hutchinson) has received perhaps the most embarrassing accolade of reaching the shortlist for the Literary Review's infamous Bad Sex Awards.

The prize, which is now in its 16th year, is intended 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 other shortlisted titles are: The Gate of Air by James Buchan (MacLehose Press); Sashenka by Simon Montefiore (Bantam Press); The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton); To Love, Honour and Betray by Kathy Lette  (Bantam Press); Shire Hell by Rachel Johnson (Penguin); Attachment by Isabel Fonseca (Chatto & Windus); Triptych of a Young Woolf by Ann Allestree (Book Guild Publishing); The Reserve by Russell Banks (Bloomsbury); and Brida by Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins).

The winner will be announced on 25th November. Last year's award was given posthumously to Norman Mailer's The Castle in the Forest (Abacus). In his absence, it was accepted by Richard Milward for his debut novel Apples (Faber). Other winners have included Tom Wolfe, Melvyn Brgg and  Alan Titchmarsh.

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