Late author wins Bad Sex award
2007-11-28 11:25
London - Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Norman Mailer, who died this month aged 84, was on Tuesday declared the winner of the 2007 Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his latest work.
Mailer, a hipster poet, director, occasional film actor, and even a New York City mayoral candidate in 1969, won the 15th annual prize for his most recent book, The Castle in the Forest, which was published this year.
Previous winners of the dubious prize, first awarded in 1993 by the Literary Review, include Booker prize-winner Salman Rushdie, AA Gill and Melvyn Bragg.
It was originally created to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."
"We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humour," the judges said of Mailer, whom they described as a "great American man of letters".
The panel commended the "variety of his work, his innovative journalism, his combative spirit and his love of life".
It is the first time the award has been given posthumously.
'Old battering ram'
Mailer's award-winning passage described a penis as an "old battering ram" - by comparison, Indian author Aniruddha Bahal, who won the award in 2003, described sex as a "cross-country" rally.
The author, who died of renal failure, penned more than 40 works with diverse styles and themes, and achieved the rare honour of being awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice.
He also wrote a famous essay railing against feminism in 1971, prompting prominent feminist Kate Millet to label him "the ultimate male chauvinist pig."
The winning excerpt:
"So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless ... The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."
- AFP