LONDON — Maybe he should have stuck to writing songs — former Smiths frontman and lyricist Morrissey has won the annual award for the poorest quality writing about sex.
The award that writers don’t want to get was given on Tuesday at a gala ceremony in central London.
The prize was given for Morrissey’s first novel, “List of the Lost.” The judges cited a scene between relay runner Ezra and his girlfriend Eliza in which the couple “rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation.”
Morrissey is the 23rd winner of the not-so-prestigious prize awarded by the Literary Review magazine to spotlight “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant” passages of sexual description. Explicitly pornographic works aren’t eligible.
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Past winners include Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.
Here’s the offending passage in its entirety:
Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with 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.