In 1993, the literary critics of the prestigious British magazine Literary Review created an annual award brimming with irony and bad temper: the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, aimed at writers who have perpetrated in one of their narratives embarrassing sexual passages for their poor quality.
This poison-laden symbolic reward sprang from the mind of the then editor of that monthly, Auberon Waugh, determined to dissuade authors from producing these hideous texts , often embedded in any way in the story and written under pressure from editors who they see a sales claim in sex.
Waugh was annoyed by the sheer number of good novels ruined by pretentious depictions of the sexual act , and so he launched this initiative, which does not take into account pornographic texts and is still so alive that some consider it “the most feared literary award in the United Kingdom ”.
Nobody is free to slip when writing sexual fictions – Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, two highly regarded authors, have won this award – but the difficulty of creating good erotic passages and not falling into the ridiculous, the corny or the simple is striking. obscene.
Ben Okri, the 2014 winner, described a woman's sexual pleasure in his novel The Age of Magic : "She became aware that there were places on her body that could only have been hidden there by a god with a sense of humor ." How not to reward it?
