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Guterson takes Bad Sex award

07.12.11 | Katie Allen

David Guterson's reimagining of the Oedipus myth, Ed King, has won the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, edging out entries from Haruki Murakami and Lee Child.

The Bloomsbury author, who won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his debut Snow Falling on Cedars, was unable to receive the award, which was presented at a ceremony last night (6th December) by "Carry On" and "Eastenders" star Barbara Windsor. However he said in response: "Oedipus practically invented bad sex, so I'm not in the least bit surprised".

The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, now in its 19th year, was set up by Auberon Waugh in order to draw attention to the "crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it".

Previous winners include Iain Hollingshead, A  A Gill and Jonathan Littell, with Rowan Somerville taking the award last year.

This year's shortlist also included: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry; The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey; Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas; 11.22.63 by Stephen King; The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M Auel; The Affair by Lee Child; Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas; Outside the Ordinary World by Dori Ostermiller; Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy; and The Great Night by Chris Adrian.
 

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