Morrissey is reportedly one of the frontrunners to win the prestigious “Bad Sex in Fiction” award from The Literary Review for writing worst sex scene in a published book this year.
The UK-based Literary Review began handing out the award in 1993 to authors authors who write “an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel,” because nobody is interested in bad sex, even on paper.
Widely mocked when it was released this fall, Morrissey’s first novel, List of the Lost is “a strong contender” for the award, according to The Guardian.
Morrissey joins a surprisingly well-known group of authors on this year’s shortlist, including George Pelecanos, writer of HBO’s The Wire, sex lit standout Erica Jong for her newest book, Fear of Dying, and Lauren Groff, whose novel Fates and Furies is also a National Book Award Finalist. To be fair, past winners include Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. John Updike received the Bad Sex in Fiction lifetime achievement award.
Meanwhile, the selection committee “considered,” but ultimately snubbed Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott’s book “Call Me Dave,” which triggered the #piggate scandal in the UK.
“Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott’s Call Me Dave was brought to the judges’ attention because of its suggestion that ‘the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth,’” the Review committee explained in the post announcing the shortlist. “That assertion was so flimsily corroborated as to resemble fiction but, regrettably, the biographers displayed insufficient literary brio to merit serious consideration.”
The Literary Review will name the winner of the “Bad Sex in Fiction” award at an event in London December 1, ahead of a published announcement in its December issue.