Italian author Erri De Luca has been crowned the winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2016 for his novel The Day Before Happiness.
De Luca fended off stiff competition from creative writing teacher Ethan Canin's A Doubter's Almanac ("The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced") and The Butcher's Hook, by former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis ("I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better") among others to become the 24th winner of the Literary Review prize.
The Bad Sex in Fiction Award judges were won over by a scene in De Luca's novel in which the Neapolitan protagonist and a mysterious woman he had watched from afar become intimate. The excerpt included the description of the male character's genitalia as being like "a plank stuck to her stomach".
Another piece of the narrative detailed how the couple's "sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe".
De Luca's trophy cabinet is already well-filled. In 2013, he won the European Prize for Literature and was hailed as "the writer of the decade" by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
