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Roth, Banville up for bad sex writing award

Roth, Banville up for bad sex writing award
Last Updated: Thursday, November 19, 2009 | 11:32 AM ET

CBC News
Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth has earned a nomination for the Bad Sex in Fiction award for a scene in The Humbling involving the seduction of a lesbian by an aging stage actor.

Roth, one of America's most esteemed writers, is in good company among this year's nominees, which include Booker Prize winner John Banville, Israeli novelist Amos Oz and punk rocker turned writer Nick Cave.

Britain's Literary Review magazine hosts the competition annually, which highlights "crude, tasteless [and] perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description."

The prize, to be awarded Nov. 30 in London, is a plaster foot.

'He takes a floating step forward...She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in a simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound.'
�John Banville, The Infinities
Sanjida O'Connell is the only woman to make the shortlist, selected for The Naked Name of Love, about a young Jesuit priest who is taught how to love by a gifted shaman woman on the eastern steppes of Mongolia.

It contained the lines: "He slid his hands around her waist. Her skin was smooth and she felt sleekly muscled, like a dolphin might..."

The other nominees:

Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand.
Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Munro.
Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones.
Amos Oz for Rhyming Life and Death.
John Banville for The Infinities.
Anthony Quinn for The Rescue Man.
Simon Van Booy for Love Begins in Winter.
Richard Milward for Ten Storey Love Song.


  • CBC (www.cbc.ca)
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