South African Novelist a Finalist in Fiction Bad Sex Award

Each year Literary Review, a London-based magazine, awards novelists a prize they really don't want to win -- the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the aim of which is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern [literary] novel, and to discourage it". This year, South Africa's Andre Brink was one of the 10 finalists for his novel Before I Forget.

Brink's novel contains descriptions such as: "[It was] like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end" and “I would plunge into her from above like a diver in search of abalone.” For a few more quotes, read this Sunday Times report.

The American novelist Tom Wolfe was this year's winner. Read CNN and BBC reports, including quotes from his winning novel.