The Shortlist for the 2013 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize from the Literary Review

Via It's a crime! (Or a mystery...)

The shortlist for the UK’s most dreaded literary prize – the 21st annual award for the most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel – is now out and the award ceremony will take place on Tuesday 3 December 2013.

An important recap: the purpose of the prize is to draw attention to the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.  The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.

The 2013 shortlist includes:

• My Education by Susan Choi
• The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood
• House of Earth by Woody Guthrie
• Motherland by William Nicholson
• The Victoria System by Eric Reinhardt
• The World Was All Before Them by Matthew Reynolds
• The City of Devi by Manil Suri
• Secrecy by Rupert Thomson

From the Literary Review’s website:

For a confessional account on Bad Sex judging by Literary Review‘s senior editor Jonathan Beckman, read his piece in the Financial Times.  You will also be able to read a more detailed report on this year’s shortlist in Literary Review‘s December / January double issue.  For snippets from the shortlist, follow Literary Review‘s twitter account, @lit_review. The tweets are tagged as #BadSex.

The Telegraph has supplied the list ‘in full’ here.

And in Guardian