This year's Bad Sex Award winner is acclaimed Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, and the prize is much deserved.
Now, the award doesn't mean Nancy Huston is bad at sex — although if the below excerpt is any indication, she can't be great at it — but it means she wrote the year's worst description of sex, as judged by London's Literary Review.
This passage from Infrared, her novel about a woman who takes raunchy photos of her lovers, beat out competition from Tom Wolfe's Back To Blood and Nicola Barker's The Yips. She's only the third woman to have won the prize, and joins past winners like Norman Mailer and John Updike (who won a Lifetime Achievement award).
Here's the excerpt that sealed it for Huston:
No sooner have we settled onto the bed and begun to remove each other's clothes with the clumsy gestures of impatience than I realise Kamal also knows about passivity — yes, he also knows how to remain still, fully awake and attentive, and give himself up to me as a cello gives itself up to a bow. Arching his back, he surrenders his face, shoulders, back and buttocks, waiting for me to play them, and I do — I play them, play with them. Most men are afraid to let go like this — whereas with a little finesse the wonders of passivity can be tasted in even the most violent throes of love-making.
In a delirium of restrained desire, I weigh, stroke and lick Kamal's balls, then take his penis in my hands, between my breasts, into my mouth. He sits up, reaches for me and I allow him to explore me in turn. He runs his tongue and lips over my breasts, the back of my neck, my toes, my stomach, the countless treasures between my legs, oh the sheer ecstasy of lips and tongues on genitals, either simultaneously or in alternation, never will I tire of that silvery fluidity, my sex swimming in joy like a fish in water, my self freed of both self and other, the quivering sensation, the carnal pink palpitation that detaches you from all colour and all flesh, making you see only stars, constellations, milky ways, propelling you bodiless and soulless into undulating space where the undulating skies make your non-body undulate...
And orgasm — the way a man's face is transformed by orgasm — oh it's not true they all look alike, you have to be either miserable and broke or furiously blasé and sarcastic to say they all look alike — to me, every climax is unique.
The prize was presented by actor Samantha Bond, and collected on Huston's behalf by her publisher, Atlantic, who read a statement from Huston: "I hope this prize will incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers' bodies in all states of array and disarray."
