Sting to Present Britain’s Bad Sex Award

Mystech: Ok, neither Sting nor Sex have anything to do with Cafe Arcane, but both are cool, so read this amusing story.

LONDON (Reuters) – No embarrassment will be spared on Wednesday when rock star Sting presents one of Britain’s least-desired literary awards — the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
Among the climactic passages in the contest is one from former BBC radio executive Rod Liddle’s “Too Beautiful for You.”

“She came with the exhilarating whoops and pant-hoots of a troop of Rhesus monkeys, which was flattering, if alarming.”

Motoring themes are to the fore. In Tama Janowitz’s “Peyton Amberg” a lover’s intimate probing of the heroine is “as if he was searching for lost car keys,” while in Aniruddha Bahal’s “Bunker 13” a female partner “picks up a Bugatti’s momentum.”

Musical metaphors are also well represented.

The multi-orgasmic female narrator of Paolo Coelho’s “Eleven Minutes” reaches Heaven — “I was the earth, the mountains, the tigers, the rivers that flowed into the lakes, the lake that became the sea.”

Sting, who once boasted that yoga had improved his sexual endurance, will present the prize Wednesday evening after each of the competing passages have been read to a 500-strong audience.

Previous winners include AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg. Now in its 11th year, the dubious honor is awarded by the Literary Review magazine for the most inept description of sexual intercourse in a novel.

Nominated authors for this year’s prize include John Updike, Paul Theroux, Paulo Coelho and Alan Parker.