The Literary Review has awarded its annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize to Rowan Somerville, a British eroticist who wrote this: "like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."

The Guardian reports that Somerville faced stiff competition from the likes of Jonathan Franzen, but Somerville triumphed with scenes from critically savaged novel The Shape of Her:

The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

He unbuttoned the front of her shirt and pulled it to the side so that her breast was uncovered, her nipple poking out, upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing in the night. He took it between his lips and sucked the salt from her.

'I want to suck you,' she said, descending […] She loosed his trousers, pulled away his underwear and gripped him with fingers tender enough to hold a tiny bird. As he felt her mouth's engulfment, he acquiesced, disappointment melting like ice in hot cream.

Somerville also describes pubes "like desert vegetation following an underground stream" and a lady's sex move as "a fish flipping itself." Congratulations, Rowan! He earned this, and took the win in stride: "There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you."

The Shape of Her is available only in England. We Americans hold our sex to more mediocre standards. [The Shape of Her Excerpt, Literary Review, Guardian, Galley Cat]