This year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards go to:
John Updike’s sex scenes — including a romp with a “Widows of Eastwick” witch in a beachside motel room — won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever- anxiously awaited Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, captured the 16th annual Bad Sex Award itself for a scene in “Shire Hell” that begins with moans and nibbles and works up to screaming and other animal noises.
Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year’s worst sex scene. London’s monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”