Writing sex scenes in books does not come easy to many writers and there are now awards for the worst of such scenes in books. On the 29th November, at a London ceremony the winner of the award was announced.
This year it was the turn of Rowan Somerville to be picked for the award of ‘bad sex in fiction’ from the Literary Review. It was his second novel ‘The Shape of Her’ which carried the line ‘She released his hair from her fingers and twisted on to her belly like a fish flipping itself’.
The author took it all in great spirit explaining that it is very English to have bad sex and therefore he was happy to accept the reward of behalf of the nation.
Also nominated was Alastair Campbell who is a former Labour minister but the award was not presented to him, despite the poor sex in his book, because it was felt it would give the wring type of publicity to the awards which came about in the hope they would encourage better writing. The whole aim of the awards being to point out sexual descriptions which are tasteless or crude in modern novels with the intention of preventing them being written by novelists who have no skill in this area or to make them feel they need to improve this aspect of their writing. Also nominated were Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ and ‘Christos Tsiolkas’s ‘The Slap’.
The awards actually started in 1993 when Auberon Waugh established them and previous winners include Melvyn Bragg, AA Gill, Normal Mailer and Tom Wolfe.
It is commonly felt that some authors should just not try to write sex scenes because they are not cut out for it. Perhaps it is just a genre that certain people can write about or perhaps it is just that the writers do not know what they can and can’t include with fear of offending their readers. Often using metaphors can end up seeming ridiculous rather than inoffensive and it could be that unless you are prepared to say exactly what you mean you should just leave well alone.