Giles Coren wins 'Bad Sex in Fiction' award

By Prasun Sonwalkar, London: Noted Indian-origin writer Salman Rushdie and Indian journalist-turned-writer Tarun Tejpal have been spared the ignominy of winning this year's Bad Sex in Fiction award - it has been awarded to journalist-writer Giles Coren's book "Winkler".

The winner of Britain's most dreaded literary prize was announced at the In and Out pub here Thursday night.

Coren's novel "Winkler" (publisher Jonathan Cape) won the award instituted by Literary Review, a London-based journal, for the most awkward description of an intimate encounter.

Coren, also known as a food critic, describes a sexual act in his book between a man and woman, in which "she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands".

The winning passage from Coren's book reads: "And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and he came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he'd ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro."

The annual award, now in its 13th year, pitted Coren against writers including John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Ben Elton, Paul Theroux and Tarun Tejpal.

The prize was presented Thursday night by former Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry.

The award's purpose is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".

Rushdie was nominated for his latest book, "Shalimar the Clown" (Jonathan Cape) while Tejpal was shortlisted for his book "The Alchemy of Desire" (Picador). The award in 2003 was given to another Indian writer, Aniridha Bahal, for his book "Bunker 13".