Author Richard Flanagan’s Sexual Prose Honored On Both Ends Of The Spectrum

Australian author Richard Flanagan's latest work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, just earned him one of the most coveted literary prizes in the world, The Man Booker Prize. It's notable contributions to literature notwithstanding, it has also just been shortlisted for a not-so prestigious honor, the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The Sydney Morning Herald (link below) reported that while the book, set during the construction of the Burma Railway during World War II, may have its literary merits, it's sexual content is a bit tone deaf.

The offending passage has the characters "circumnavigation of each other" rudely interrupted by the howling of a drooling dog carrying a half dead fairy penguin in its mouth.

"Whatever had held them apart, whatever had restrained their bodies before, was now gone," Flanagan writes. "If the earth spun it faltered, if the wind blew it waited. Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world. As they lost themselves in the circumnavigation of each other, there came from nearby shrill shrieks that ended in a deeper howl.

"Dorrigo looked up. A large dog stood at the top of the dune. Above blood-jagged drool, its slobbery mouth clutched a twitching fairy penguin."

Were Flanagan to beat out his competition, which Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham and fellow Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, he would join some fairly esteemed company.

The journal states the purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them, and is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.

Established by Auberon Waugh in 1993, Britain's most dreaded literary prize has been won by Sebastian Faulks, Norman Mailer and A.A. Gill.

Best of luck to all involved.

Via Sydney Morning Herald