Morrissey’s ‘bulbous salutation’ novel wins Bad Sex Award 2015

Literary Review's annual prize rewards the year's worst descriptions of sex in literature

Morrissey‘s debut novel List Of The Lost has won the infamous Bad Sex Award for 2015.

The book was released earlier this year and was met with harsh criticism at the time, particularly for its passages on sex.

One such passage included the self-confessed ‘humasexual’ author writing: “Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”

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The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award honours the “most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction” every year with List Of The Lost announced as this year’s winner at a ceremony held in London and presented by Nancy Dell’Olio on Tuesday (December 1). Morrissey was unable to attend.

Other titles on the shortlist include Before, During, After by Richard Bausch, Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen and Against Nature by Tomas Espedal.

Previous nominees for the unwelcome accolade include Alastair Campbell, Stephen King, Melvyn Bragg, A. A. Gill and Alan Titchmarsh.

SEE MORE: Morrissey – ‘List Of The Lost’ “A bizarrely cringeworthy and overblown debut from the musical icon”

NMEAndy Ford/NME

In a statement issued to NME at the time of the book’s publication, the Literary Review described the book as a “obvious frontrunner” for the prize.

They added: “Morrissey’s sex scene is an astonishing bid by a first time novelist for this year’s Literary Review Bad Bad Sex In Fiction Award. It’s convoluted, overwrought and profoundly unsexy. The List Of The Lost could have done with less of lust.”

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Morrissey recently responded to criticism of his debut novel, describing reviews of List Of The Lost as “an attack against me as a human being.”

Writing in an email interview with Chilean website in October, Morrissey claimed that the response to the book was based more on the fact he wrote it than what he wrote.

“I strongly believe in freedom of expression and critics have to say what they have to say,” he stated. “But often the criticisms are an attack against me as a human being and have nothing to do with what they’re reading.”

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