Literary Winners

Have to some catching up to do with letting you know about recent winners of literary prizes. Petina Gappah has won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award for her short story collection An Elegy for Easterly. Claire Armistead, chair of the judges, praised the books as a:

...humane and disarmingly funny mosaic of life in Zimbabwe

You can enjoy the first lines from each story on Petina's website, and read about her feelings on winning the prize on her blog. Debut novelist Evie Wyld beat some pretty fierce competition (including Booker winner Aravind Adiga and Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is :

... set in eastern Australia and tells a story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things that they will never know about each other.

PddQ8xLinAc >Louise Doughty, chair of Judges, described the novel as :

... a remarkable book. A sometimes poignant, sometimes comic story of a father and son who have so much in common but never quite connect, it is awash with fine images that linger in the mind. Wyld’s choice of subject matter is both brave and wide-ranging, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to the back country of Eastern Australia, Wyld captures the inflections of male speech and male bonding in a way that feels both acute and realistic. Most importantly, she writes brilliantly, able to paint a picture or create a convincing encounter with a few deft, evocative strokes, in a prose style worthy of our very best writers. There is nothing 'first novelish' about this first novel. It's a fantastically mature book, never showy, a slow burn that drags the reader in.

Wyld was one of Granta's Voices of 2008, and you can catch her talking about her book on YouTube. Then there's the infamous Bad Sex Award in fiction, which I mentioned a few days back. This year it was won by Jonathan Littell. One extract from The Kindly Ones that the judges felt merited the award compares a woman's genitalia and :

a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.

But the award is all about schoolboy sniggering, suggests Oliver Marre in The Telegraph :

It is funny – and also quite satisfying – to see the winner of the Prix Goncourt tittered at like this but the fact remains that his description of sex wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t worse, say, than his description of love or violence when taken out of context.

David Hewson has a very good piece on his blog called Do We Need Sex in Fiction, which I think every potential novelist, wanting to avoid the pitfalls, should read.

Another Year of Bad Sex

Maybe Neil Gaiman got it succinctly right on Twitter a few hours ago :

Just read the Guardian Bad Sex Award contenders ... I may never write a sex scene ever again. O Roth. O Banville. Argh.

Yes, it's that time of year again when literary lust becomes fodder for fun. The Guardian has extracts from all the 2009 nominees for The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award which you can read at your peril. But those of you of a somewhat tenderer disposition may want to ignore the link. (I started down the list earlier but had had a surfeit of fictional bonking before I made it through all the contenders, so will resume later in the interest of - ahem - research. ) My question to you is, do you really think these are examples of bad writing about sex? The Roth extract, green dildo aside (!) i though pretty intriguing and I'm off to buy the book. I didn't snigger pruriently at Banville's :

... tang of fish-slime and sawdust ... .

Theroux's : '

Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.

is a rather sweet line I can hear being taken up as a reprise by his female readers and Richard Milward's, yes, IS funny - but that is his intention surely? The usual refrain on posts of this nature on my blog - sex is very difficult to write well anyway. Postscript : And that is the point made very well in Sarah Duncan's response on The Guardian blog :

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture.

Rachels' Bad Sex

There's one literary prize no author likes to win or even be nominated for - the annual Literary Review magazine's Bad Sex In Fiction Award .... This year the dubious honour goes to Rachel Johnson (quoted above) for a passage in her novel Shire Hell. I'm sure the line about "the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo" clinched her the victory.

The author accepted the award graciously but cautioned:

The truth is that anyone who writes sex scenes has [the award] at the back of their mind ... It makes you even more self-conscious when you're lubricating your book with sex.

All the shortlisted entries are here for you to merrily chortle over. And in case you missed them, posts about the previous years' entries are archived here.

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!)

If it's November, it's Time for Bad Sex

Hurray! I thought: the announcement of the longlist for my favourite literary book prize of the year: the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards.

McEwan's in with a chance of bagging this one, Michelle Pauli reports in the Guardian:

He is joined on the longlist of what the organisers call Britain's "most dreaded literary prize" by Jeanette Winterson with a passage about robotic sex from The Stone Gods; Ali Smith for Girl Meets Boy, and Gary Shteyngart with an athletic description of his crass hero from Absurdistan bedding one of his many conquests ("Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media - a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future"). ... The late Norman Mailer makes a posthumous appearance with a passage from The Castle in the Forest in which the male protagonist's "Hound" is described as "soft as a coil of excrement". More poetic bawdiness is on offer from Christopher Rush's life of Shakespeare, told in the Bard's "own words", and his maritime-themed description of coitus with Anne Hathaway, in which "I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth ... Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey's end, love's end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail."

Does McEwan deserve an award meant to:

... draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it...?

I'm actually feeling quite outraged that anyone should have a snigger at McEwan's expense and can only think it's a reflection of the enduring British embarrassment about things sexual.The whole point of On Chesil Beach is that he is deliberately setting out to write about sex so disastrous that it has life-time consequences. And I feel he does it very well indeed.

I can't speak about the other nominees, not having read them ... but I think that quote from Absurdistan (above) rather lovely. I don't find myself laughing at Christopher Rush's maritime imagery either. What do you think?

My favourite award and this year a sense of bewilderment ...

More Bad Sex

As you know, I get a bit jaded with all the literary word longlists, shortlists, winners. But wicked reader that I am, there is one award I never get tired of blogging about.

Yes, it's that time of year again and the Guardian headline yesterday said it all:

Stiff competition on Bad Sex shortlist

The Literary Review's annual prize was awarded last night for the most:

... unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant sex scene in an otherwise sound literary novel ...

and had a distinguished list of contenders this year including David Mitchell, Thomas Pyncheon, and Irvine Walsh. Enjoy Michelle Pauli's guide to the finalists.

I must say I was rooting for Pyncheon who was in the running with an entry from his new novel Against the Day, about which Pauli says:

Suffice to say it involves a spaniel called Mouffette, a curious man called Reef and the final line, "Reader, she bit him".

The winner, announced a few hours ago, was Iain Hollingshead, at 26 the youngest ever recipient of the prize. His extract from Twentysomething was judged to be hilarious:

"And then I'm inside her, and everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles ..."

Hollingshead was reported to be delighted with the award and said he hopes to win it every year.

The more established nominees on the list were judged by the panel to be:

...beyond help at this point.

Update

Tom Fleming gives his take on the prize and winners in the Guardian blog. All the extracts are listed here.

Ohh ... and you must read Iain Hollingshead's account of the award ceremony in the Telegraph:

I blush to read my offending prose now ...

he says. As well he might.

Related Posts:

Bad Sex, Good Sex (14/11/05)
Hurray for Bad Sex (28/11/05)
And the Bad Sex Award Goes to ... (3/12/05)

And the Bad Sex Award Goes to ...

... Giles Coren, who sportingly turned up to accept his prize (unlike Tom Woolfe last year).

You can read the winning passage (which includes description of a certain part of the male anatomy "leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath") here along with those of the other runners-up. Don't say I didn't warn you!

And if you wish you'd been at the award ceremony where "Filth and hilarity abounded in equal measure", you can at least read about it on the Culture Vulture blog.

Hurray for Bad Sex!

Nominations are now in for Britain's "most dreaded literary prize" with contenders including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia marquez and Paul Theroux. Michelle Pauli writing in today's Guardian puts her money on Theroux:

Theroux's offering, from Blinding Light, is arguably the most deserving of the prize, with its description of a character's orgasm as'...not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.'

Enough to put you off - both sex and literature - for a while.

Bad Sex, Good Sex

Writes Elizabeth Benedict in The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers:

… sex makes people vulnerable. And in that vulnerability, we change and we do things that surprise us. Sometimes we become cruel, sometimes we become infantile, sometimes we fall in love. And sex is very powerful. As writers we have to learn how to exploit the power of sex in our writing ...

Many writers, among them the most famous and respected, fall flat on their bums. Others use sex effectively, not only to get deep inside their characters' skins, but to underline the message of their novel.

My article in the current issue of chrome is about getting sex down to the page, so now with your appetite whetted, go buy! (And if I'm not a sufficient draw, I'm sandwiched between Dina Zaman talking about talking respectfully, and Oon Yeoh writing about Khairy Jamaluddin.)

Tom Wolfe Gets Bad Sex Award

The Bad Sex Award is given each year by the Literary Review for the funniest, most embarrasing sex scene in a novel.

Enjoyment

Poor Tom Wolfe, I thought until I read the scene from I Am Charlotte ... and then I was in stitches:

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue. But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!"

Was an award ever so well-deserved?

André Brink (a runner-up) doesn't even come near: "[Her vulva was] like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end."

I'm off now to see if I can slip "otorhinolaryngological" into a conversation with someone.

(Later ...)

Have to spend some time practising it first. It's damned hard to get your tongue round. Which of course is a pun. Perhaps Wolfe was being tongue in cheek when he used the word? (Or tongue up nose, tongue down throat ...)