Bad sex award 2016: the contenders in quotes

The Literary Review ’s 24th annual award for the most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction will be revealed at the end of the month.

This year’s nominations include Ian McEwan, Eimear McBride and Jonathan Safran Foer. The judges’ attention was particularly caught by several passages from Safran Foer’s Here I Am, including lines such as: “He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.” However, these authors ultimately failed to make the grade.

So too did Donald Trump, despite his best efforts to crown his recent electoral triumph with a still more glorious prize. Several readers nominated his “locker-room talk”, but this had to be discounted on the ground that the award only covers fiction.

The books under consideration nonetheless represent a distinguished selection of authors. They include a New York Times bestselling author (Gayle Forman), a European Prize for Literature winner (Erri De Luca), a teacher of creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Ethan Canin) and a former presenter of Blue Peter (Janet Ellis).

Last year the prize was won by Morrissey for List of the Lost (Penguin Classics). He was not available for comment. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.

Highlighted extracts

A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin

The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced. She liked to do it more than once, and he was usually able to comply. Bourbon was his gasoline. Between sessions, he poured it at the counter while she lay panting on the sheets. Sweat burnished her body. The lean neck. The surprisingly full breasts. He would down another glass and return.

The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler

He closed his eyes and heard himself make a gurgling sound. And as his trousers slipped down his legs all the burdens of his life to date seemed to fall away from him; he tipped back his head and faced up into the darkness beneath the ceiling, and for one blessed moment he felt as if he could understand the things of this world in all their immeasurable beauty. How strange they are, he thought, life and all of these things. Then he felt Anezka slide down before him to the floor, felt her hands grab his naked buttocks and draw him to her. ‘Come, sonny boy!’ he heard her whisper, and with a smile he let go.

Men Like Air by Tom Connolly

Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks... He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo.

The Butcher’s Hook by Janet Ellis

‘Anne,’ he says, stopping and looking down at me. I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. ‘Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better.’ He sways and we listen to the soft suck at the exact place we meet. Then I move and put all thoughts of livestock out of his head.

Leave Me by Gayle Forman

All night long, in spite of her best efforts not to, she’d been remembering what it was like to have sex with Jason: his penchant for kissing nonkissable places, the crooks of elbows, the soles of feet. His delightful unpredictability as a lover, caressing her hair one moment, pinning her hands behind her the next.

The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca

My body was her gearstick. She wasn’t breathing. Her eyes seemed faraway.

‘Anna,’ I called, chained to her movement.

‘Sì, sì.’ From her came perfect syllables. I called her to make her breathe. I called her to hear: ‘Sì.’ Her ‘yes’ called me and I was about to say it too when with one thrust I sank into her without coming back out. She took her hands from my hips and from my prick came the entire ‘yes’ that had coursed through her. The ‘yes’ of my emptying and my goodbye, my welcome, the ‘yes’ of a marionette that flops without a hand to hold its strings.

The winner will be announced on November 30th.