WWW- Journalist and author Giles Coren’s [pictured] novel Winkler has won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the most awkward description of an intimate encounter.
The food critic’s book describes a sexual act between a man and a woman, in which “she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands”.
The rest of the winning passage is unprintable for a family audience.
The annual award pitted Coren against writers including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Ben Elton and Paul Theroux.
It is for “crude, tasteless” sexual depictions in published literature.
The winner was announced at a ceremony on Thursday night in London, with former Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry presenting the prize.
US author Tom Wolfe won last year, for the novel I am Charlotte Simmons.
The prize, now in its 13th year, is organised by the Literary Review magazine.
The award’s purpose is “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.
Updike was nominated for his novel Villages, Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown, Elton for The First Casualty and Theroux for Blinding Light.
Updike wrote about Faye, who “leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity”, while her partner was “like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows”.
Elton’s novel included the phrase: “Oooh-la-jolly well-la!”
Elton’s extract from his book included the following:
“‘Ooh-la-la!’ she breathed as he smelt the clean aroma of her short bobbed hair and the rain-sodden grass around it. ‘Oooh-la-jolly well-la!’
“And so they made love together in the pouring rain, with Nurse Murray emitting a stream of girlish exclamations which seemed to indicate that she was enjoying herself.”
Rushdie wrote about an encounter involving Boonyi, who “pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot”.
Last year’s winner Wolfe was nominated for three passages in his novel about hedonistic college life.
Previous winners include AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg.