Rachel Johnson wins Bad Sex award

Rachel Johnson (pictured), sister of the London mayor Boris Johnson, has won the Literary Review magazine's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, held on Monday night at the In & Out club in London. In doing so she beat off
a host of authors, among them Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, whose debut novel All in the Mind had attracted considerable attention for the weakness of its description of the sexual act.

Johnson's victory appeared to be largely down to her use of animal metaphors in her novel Shire Hell. These included comparing her male protagonist's "light fingers" to "a moth caught inside a lampshade", and his tongue to "a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop".

The Literary Review's deputy editor, Tom Fleming, said he had been disturbed by the heroine's "grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside". Commenting on this passage, he said: "You sort of think it might be a typo, but she is actually referring to his penis as him."

A lifetime achievement award was also given in absentia to John Updike for this passage from The Witches of Eastwick:

'She said nothing then, her lovely mouth otherwise engaged, until he came, all over her face. She had gagged, and moved him outside her lips, rubbing his spurting glans across her cheeks and chin. He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his asshole, continued, but he didn't know what name to call her "Mrs Rougement" was the name he had always known her by. God, she was antique, but here they were. Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea. The rhythmic relentless shushing returned to their ears. She laid her head on the pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism. Having got rid of it, there was an aftermath of sorrow in which he needed to be alone; but there was no getting rid of her. "Call me Sukie," she said, having read his mind. "I sucked your cock." 'You sure did. Thanks. Wow."'

The awards were set up Auberon Waugh, the son of novelist Evelyn Waugh, to "gently dissuade" authors from including "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels".