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Tony Blair Alistair Campbell

Author nets bad sex in fiction award

Author

By The Drum Team, Editorial

November 30, 2010 | 2 min read

Rowan Somerville, author of “The Shape of Her” has won Literary Review’s bad sex in literature award.

Judges singled out lines such as: "She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself," and “'Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her;” as exemplifying the author’s poor writing.

Alistair Campbell was disappointed to lose out on the award, having publicly proclaimed his desire to win, this stemmed from a line in his novel, Maya: “The walls were going to fall down as we stroked and screamed our way through hours of pleasure to the union for which my whole life had been a preparation."

Campbell’s former boss, Tony Blair, made it as far as the long list for a diaquieting account of a night with Cherie: “I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct."

The gong aims to recognise the most cringeworthy prose to emerge from British literature in an attempt to protect readers from future instances of toe curling writing.

In this the Literary Review is likely to be thwarted however as far from being apologetic at his embarrassing prose Sommerville has been revelling in his sexual infamy: “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation, I thank you," he said.

Tony Blair Alistair Campbell

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