London - Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark is up against the winner of the Man Booker Prize for a dubious honour in the literary world – the Bad Sex In Fiction award.
The shortlist for the prize, created by Literary Review, features ten works, including Wark’s novel The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle and the Booker-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian Richard Flanagan.
Organisers say the idea is to draw attention to “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them”.
Wark’s novel includes the passage: “I had never imagined that I was capable of wanton behaviour, but it was as if a dam within me had burst and we made love that day and night like two people starved, slowly suffused with more and more pleasure, exploring and devouring every inch of each other, so as not to miss one single possibility of passion.”
Announcing the shortlist, the magazine said: “The judges also considered Andrew Marr’s Head of State, which started arrestingly – ‘they bucked like deer and squirmed like eels. And after that, vice-versa’ – but failed to sustain its early promise.”
The prize will be awarded on December 3. - Daily Mail