And the Winner of this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award is …

By Niall McArdle

Manil Suri has won the 2013 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for this piece of marvellously sweaty purple prose involving supernovae and quantum mechanics, from his novel The City of Devi

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.

Is all this astrophysics-themed sex what Raj from The Big Bang Theory would regard as erotica?

As with any literary prize, critics are divided as to whether it was deserved. After all, Suri beat out some tough competition.