Mailer scoops Bad Sex award from the grave

Even the grave is unable to constrain the all-round behemoth Norman Mailer, it would appear. The American writer, who died earlier this month at the age of 84, has won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his final novel, The Castle in The Forest, which was published this year. The winning extract from the novel, a recollection of Adolf Hitler's childhood through the eyes of a demon sent to inveigle the youth along the road to evil, describes a male member as being 'as soft as a coil of excrement' and talks of the male character being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'.

Phillip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, explained that "it was the excrement that tipped the balance," putting Mailer ahead of the other contenders, who included Ali Smith and Christopher Rush. Smith whetted the judges' appetites with her muddled metaphors for human bodies in sexual congress - 'we were the tail of a fish, the reek of a cat'. Rush's description of a young William Shakespeare's encounter with Anne Hathaway spoke of him 'clinging like a mariner to her heaving haunches'.

The judges felt Mailer would have taken the award with good humour, an observation easier made with the literary hardman six feet under. Mailer's temper and penchant for violence were legendary; he frequently engaged in both mental and physical brawls with his contemporaries, and stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife at a party in 1960.