Subatomic bisexual orgy beats hillbilly humping to Bad Sex Fiction award

An ecstatic bisexual orgy, which climaxes against a backdrop of imminent nuclear annihilation, has secured the prized Bad Sex in Fiction award for Manil Suri and his novel, The City of Devi.



The Indian-born author triumphed over authors including William Nicholson, who said he was “ashamed” to have been shortlisted and Woody Guthrie, the Depression-era folk singer whose posthumously-published novel House of Earth featured ripe descriptions of hillbilly humping.

However The City of Devi, set in Mumbai as the city is locked-down under the threat of a nuclear bomb, best satisfied the instruction, first laid down when the award was established by Auberon Waugh in 1993, to single out “the crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.” The novel follows three characters: Sarita, her physicist husband Karun, who has disappeared, and Jaz, a young gay Muslim. The judges were won over by the diffusion of sexual ecstasy through time, space and consciousness at the climax of an extended sex scene involving all three characters.



It reads: “Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.” The 21st Bad Sex winner was announced in front of 400 guests at the In & Out Club in Mayfair, London. But Suri, 54, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland who has previously been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Pen/Faulkner Award, declined to accept the prize in person.