Iain Hollingshead, a twenty-six-year-old British novelist, has won the fourteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel Twenty Something: The Quarter-Life Crisis of Jack Lancaster (Duckworth, 2006). The award, sponsored by the Literary Review, a monthly magazine published in London, is given "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
The following is a passage from Hollingshead's award-winning novel: "Everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles."
The finalists for the prize included David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (Sceptre; Random House, 2006), Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother (Jonathan Cape; Doubleday, 2006), Julia Glass's The Whole World Over (Hutchinson; Pantheon Books, 2006); Irvine Welsh's Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (Jonathan Cape; Norton, 2006), Tim Willocks's The Religion (Jonathan Cape, 2006; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), Will Self's The Book of Dave (Viking; Bloomsbury, 2006), and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (Jonathan Cape; Penguin Press, 2006).
Among last year's finalists were Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, and John Updike. Previous winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award include Sebastian Faulks and Tom Wolfe.
For an excerpt from this year's winning book as well as the finalists, visit the Guardian's Web site.
