LONDON – First-time author Iain Hollingshead received a dubious literary honor Wednesday, winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel, “Twenty Something.”
Hollingshead beat established writers including Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell, best-seller Mark Haddon and literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to win the prize, which aims to skewer “the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.”
Judges were moved by Hollingshead’s evocation of “a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles.” His description of “bulging trousers” sealed the win, the judges said.
“Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts,” the judges – editors of Literary Review magazine – said in a statement. “Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point.”
Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from rocker Courtney Love at a London ceremony, said he was delighted to become the prize’s youngest winner.
“I hope to win it every year,” said Hollingshead, who received a statuette and a bottle of champagne.
Now in its 14th year, the award was established by the Literary Review to celebrate truly cringe-worthy erotic writing.
This year’s runner-up was Tim Willcocks’ medieval action novel, “The Religion,” for a scene in which characters grapple passionately in a forge “across the cold steel face of the anvil.”
“In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil’s Fire,” Willcocks writes.
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