Italian novelist wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award

Acclaimed Italian author, poet and translator Erri De Luca has just won the 2016 Bad Sex Award winner for a passage from his novel The Day Before Happiness.

The author was given the award because of his description of the male character's genitalia as being like "a plank stuck to her stomach". Also, private parts are compared to "ballet dancers hovering en pointe."

He writes: “My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach. With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her. She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my prick against her opening. I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.”

De Luca who has been hailed as "the writer of the decade" by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and won the European Prize for Literature in 2013, was pronounced the winner of the 24th annual award at the aptly named In and Out Club in London.

Though he was unable to attend, his publisher at Allen Lane accepted the prize on his behalf.

Despite the sniggers that greet the annual announcement, the aim of the Bad Sex Prize, established since 1993 by the Literary Review, is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction.

Since then it has become the one prize literary authors hope to avoid.

Last year, the singer Morrissey won for a passage in his debut novel List of the Lost.

In 2014, Nigerian Ben Okri has also received the unwelcome accolade for his “ecstatic” love scene featuring a stray rocket going off somewhere in the night.

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