Zoe Strimpel

“It’s terribly British, isn’t it,” said the man next to me at last night’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony at the (appropriately named) In and Out Club in St James’s. He was referring, of course, to the yearly bash—now in its 24th year—in which the Literary Review magazine nominates half a dozen passages from contemporary fiction seen to represent sex at its most cringeworthy, reads them out to champagne-infused guffaws, and then awards a prize to the author of the worst.