One of the most dubious honors in all of literature has been handed out. If you've been following our coverage of the Literary Review's 2014 Bad Sex in Fiction award, you know how tight this year's race was. We even brought in Stephen Hawking to demonstrate how bad some of these were. Nevertheless, there's got to be a winner, and this year, it's Ben Okri.
According to The Guardian (link below), this is former Booker Prize winner Okri's second Bad Sex in Fiction award for only his tenth novel. That's a hell of a batting average.
Okri won the Booker in 1991 for The Famished Road and has received, among other prizes, the Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction prize. Unable to attend, he issued a terse and less than ecstatic statement: “A writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it.”
Laura Palmer, editorial director of Head of Zeus, accepting the award on his behalf was more chipper: “This completes every start-up publisher’s dream hat-trick: Head of Zeus have now won a Political Book award, the Metadata Gold Standard award, and the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award all in a single year.”
Okri’s editor, Maggie McKernan, said: “Winning the award is fun but a bit undignified, just like sex, assuming you do it properly.”
Via The Guardian