Author David Guterson won the UK's "most dreaded literary prize," the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for a torrid romp between a mother and her son in his latest book Ed King, a recasting of the Oedipus myth.
Presented during a ceremony last night at the Naval and Military Club on St James's Square, London, the prize was granted for a 12-hour sequence of what Guterson calls "gyrations and five-sense choreographies" - ending with a morning shower during which she "abused him with a bar of soap".
"Oedipus practically invented bad sex, so I'm not in the least bit surprised," Guterson said in a statement distributed by Britain's Literary Review, which organized the contest.
The author, who lives in the US, was unable to attend.
Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Jonathan Littell, the Bad Sex in Fiction contest seeks to shame the author of the year's "most embarrassing passages of sexual description in a literary novel".
Inaugurated in 1993 by the late Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh, the prize has instead encouraged authors to spice up sex scenes to boost sales.
"Without wanting to sound priggish, this prize has spectacularly backfired," Waugh's son, author Alexander Waugh, told the gathering, held in a room lined with red wallpaper.
The prize could have been won by a "disappointingly large number of books" this year, he said. Murakami, Stephen King, Guterson, who made his name with Snow Falling on Cedars, narrowly defeated competition from Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, Chris Adrian's The Great Night and Lee Child's The Affair, the judges said.
Irish author Sebastian Barry was also on the shortlist for a passage in his latest book On Canaan's Side. The offending sequence takes place on a Sunday monring.
"We were lying side by side one Sunday morning and with one accord, without real thought, with the simple instinct of ordinary human creatures, we turned to each other and gently kissed, then fiercely, like wakening beasts, and before we knew where we were, like a sudden walking storm down the lake that we had witnessed in the deeper weather, we seemed to go out into a stormy gear, we clutched at each other, we got rid of our damned clothes, and clung, and he was in me then, and we were happy, happy, young, in that room by the water, and the poetry that is available to anyone was available to us at last, and we breathed each other in, and in those moments both knew we would marry each other after all, and not a word needed to be spoken about it."
Pornographic or expressly erotic works are excluded from the contest. Yet the Literary Review judges always find plenty to choose from. Murakami became a finalist for likening a pair of upturned nipples to "a vine's new tendrils seeking sunlight".
Child was cited for a passage that begins, "Then it was time. We started tenderly. Long and slow, long and slow."
The shortlist also included James Frey for The Final Testament of the Holy Bible ("His breath felt hot and smelled sweet") and Stephen King for 11/22/63 ("It was the sound of greedy discovery in her voice that put me over the edge").
The other finalists were The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel; Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas; Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy; Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas; and Outside the Ordinary World by Dori Ostermiller.
Auberon Waugh established the prize to draw attention to the "crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it".
Reuters