Manil Suri has won the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award for a scene in his novel The City of Devi describing a sexual encounter in terms of exploding supernovas and streaking superheroes, Britain's Literary Review has said.

The prize aims to draw attention to "crude, badly written, or perfunctory use of passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it".The journal said judges were won over by The City of Devi.

“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains,” wrote Suri, who is also a professor of mathematics.

“We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.” – (Reuters)