Bad sex prize claimed by egg orgasm

Metro.co
Acclaimed author Jonathan Littell, who won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2006 for his novel The Kindly Ones, has picked up another, slightly less coveted prize – the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The annual prize was contested by literary heavyweights Philip Roth for The Humbling, John Banville for The Infinites and Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand.

However. Littell’s ill-advised use of a soft-boiled egg as a simile for orgasmic release saw him beat off the competition to take the prize.

The judges praised what they called Littell’s ‘ambitious and impressive’ novel, which was originally published in French, and sold over 1million copies in its original language.

‘It is in part a work of genius,’ they said.

‘However, a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as “I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg” clinched the award for The Kindly Ones.

‘We hope he takes it in good humour,’ they added.

Littell was not expected to attend the prize ceremony in London.

Other passages that helped Littell claim the prize include one sentence that begins ‘The dry and nervous orgasm, almost spermless, tore me open as a fish knife would…’ and the ‘mythologically inspired’ section which includes the phrase ‘If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my pr*** like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody.’

The award was established by Auberon Waugh in 1993, designed to draw attention to the ‘crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it.’