DAYS after Hari Kunzru’s latest novel was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book Award, he has suffered the indignity of being a contender for Britain’s most dreaded literary honour: the annual prize for rotten erotic writing.

The Impressionist, a story set in India at the turn of the century, is up for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, founded by the Literary Review to recognise the worst, most embarrassing description of the sexual act in the modern novel.

After poring over clumsy sexual descriptions by a variety of authors, the judges have drawn up a longlist of ten, published today.

Kunzru faces competition from writers including Will Self and John Banville. They are in good company. Previous recipients have included Melvyn Bragg, with Salman Rushdie and Doris Lessing among the runners-up.

The late Auberon Waugh, as Editor-in-Chief of the Literary Review, established the award because he felt that novelistswere being pressurised into writing about sex. He believed that the prize might discourage embarrassing passages about sex.

Nancy Sladek, editor of the magazine, said yesterday: “It hasn’t quite worked. There’s still enough out there for the prize to continue.”

Passages chosen from The Impressionist by the Literary Review include: “His head has been pushed down into the dusty bedclothes, so he cannot see the purple face of the man toiling behind him. He is aware, however, that the pounding is punctuated by buttock-slaps and regular full-throated hunting cries. As the major’s excitement mounts, ‘Tally-ho!’ gives way to ‘On! On! On!’, and the bed groans with the effort of maintaining its structural integrity.”

The winner will be announced on December 3 at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square. The prize is a semi-abstract statue representing Sex in the 1950s, as well as a bottle of champagne if the winning author turns up to receive it.

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