Mailer's Bad Sex

Norman Mailer has posthumously won the Literary Reviews Bad Sex Award for a graphic passage from his last novel the Castle in the Forest.

We are sure he would have taken the award in good part

said the judges, while the award itself was presented at the In & Out (Naval and Military) Club in St James's, by former model Maria Helvin to the youngest of the nominees, Richard Milward.

I know you literature lovers will want to read the winning extract, so here 'tis, the account of an incestuous encounter between Hitler's parents :

Are you all right?' she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of their lost children.

'All right. Yes. No,' he said. Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

You can read all the runners-up on the Guardian website.

(Thanks Chet for breaking news via SMS!)