Ben Okri gets nominated for 'bad sex' award

Lagos - UK based Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s The Age of Magic has been nominated in the shortlist for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, The Guardian reports.

The Nigerian author and Booker winner in the book describes a scene in which a woman becomes “aware of places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour”. This earned him the nomination.


Richard Flanagan who won the last Booker prize with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is also shortlisted for the award.
Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham‘s The Snow Queen was also nominated.

The Literary Review sets out to find “the most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction”, and describes itself as “Britain’s most dreaded literary prize”.

 Established by Auberon Waugh in 1993, its purpose is to draw attention to “perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them”, with former winners including Sebastian Faulks, AA Gill and Melvyn Bragg.
We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”

This year’s winner will be announced on 3 December.

The shortlist in full:
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
The Age of Magic by Ben Okri
The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd
Desert God by Wilbur Smith
Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan
The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh
The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark