IT HAD, acknowledged one of the participants, all the elements of a bad awards ceremony: pious, self-congratulatory speeches and a lack of surprise.
Wolfe, 74, best-known for his novel Bonfire of the Vanities and for his eccentric dress - he normally wears a white suit and carries a cane - was awarded the Bad Sex award by the Literary Review last month for his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, the story of a naïve, country girl who attends an Ivy League college.
But in 1993 its editor, Auberon Waugh, created a monster, soon to raise its ugly head again – the bad sex award, a prize for the most embarrassing description of sex in a new novel.
There is always the fear that you'll win not the Booker prize but the Bad Sex Award.
It sells itself as "Britain's most dreaded literary prize": every winter the London-based Literary Review's Bad Sex Award is conferred upon the author who is deemed to have penned the worst sex scene of the past year.
Thus each and every one of the sex scenes read out loud at the Bad Sex Award each year is a contender for the prize, but put them in the context of the larger story being told and the tone changes completely.
Bayes misses the point of the Bad Sex Award, and, further, her criticism of British theater in fact parallels the ideology behind the award.
McBride likens writing to "animal instinct" and I tell her the prize she is not about to win is the Bad Sex award.
In the year that has seen "mummy porn" take over the best-seller lists as EJ James Fifty Shadess of Grey phenomenon spawns copycat publications from Sylvia Day's Crossfire trilogy to further Twilight fan fiction, the Bad Sex award is as prescient as ever - but the prize does not cover "pornographic or expressly erotic literature".
And she replied, 'Don't worry, I don't think it's going to win the Bad Sex Award.'" (He's referring to the infamous annual prize instituted by the late Auberon Waugh and given by The Literary Review).
