Bad Sex Award for Grunts and Squeaks November 30, 2006
Of all the awards, from all the magazines, in all the world- this one had to be mine. That had to be what Iain Hollingshead was thinking as he beat out Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell and Thomas Pynchon to win the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Now in its 14th year, the award was presented, appropriately enough by Courtney Love in London. Mr. Hollinghead’s work was honored, as are all winner’s, for supreme achievement in what the judges describe ‘ as the crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’
According to the judges, Hollingsheads’s Twenty Something was chosen partly because it is his first novel , and partly because of his description of grunts, squeaks, and bulging pants. The judges apparently believe that more established writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, are are too set in their literary ways and are beyond help. Officials had hoped that intervening early with Mr. Hollingshead to ensure that either no erotica or material of a higher quality ensues in his later work, but so far the effort as failed, . Hollingshead expressed his fervent desire to win the award every year- not what the judges had in mind, but probably more difficult than winning the Nobel Prize.
Read more about this year’s award from CBC
