Morrissey took top (?) honors at this year’s Literary Review “Bad Sex in Fiction” Award for his critically panned debut novel, List of the Lost.
The annual prize, now in its 22nd year, was established by literary critic Rhoda Koenig, and English journalist Auberon Waugh to “honor an author who has produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel” and not “pornographic or expressly erotic literature.”
Morrissey’s novel, set in the seventies at a Boston college, is about four relay runners who are cursed after accidentally killing an old man. Morrissey faced stiff competition from a shortlist that included Fear of Dying by Erica Jong, The Martini Shot by The Wire’s George Pelecanos, and Before, During, After by Richard Bausch, but Morrissey’s novel (the early favorite) and its purple euphemisms were unmatched:
At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.
Though Morrissey was unable to attend the ceremony to receive his award due to his touring commitment, he now joins an illustrious list of past winners that includes Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and John Updike.
(h/t Telegraph)