First-time author Iain Hollingshead scooped a dubious literary honor on Wednesday, winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel Twenty Something.
Hollingshead beat established writers including Irvine Welsh, Will Self, David Mitchell and US literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to the prize, which aims to skewer "the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."
Judges were moved by the evocation in Hollingshead's novel of "a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles."
His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win, the judges said.
"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts," the judges -- editors of Literary Review magazine -- said in a statement.
"Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point," the statement said.
Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from musician Courtney Love at a ceremony in London, said he was delighted to have become the youngest winner to date of the Bad Sex in Fiction award.
"I hope to win it every year," said Hollingshead, who receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne.
Now in its 14th year, the award was established by the Literary Review to celebrate truly cringe-worthy erotic writing.
"It's mixed metaphors, embarrassing fumbling. It's the redundancy of the scene in an otherwise good novel," assistant editor Philip Womack said.
This year's runner-up was Tim Willcocks' medieval action novel The Religion, for a scene in which characters grapple passionately in a forge "across the cold steel face of the anvil."
"In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire," Willcocks writes.
Willcocks praised the Bad Sex prize as "a much better guide to a good read than those purveyors of powerful sleeping drugs, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt et. al."
Other finalists included Mitchell's 1980s coming-of-age story Black Swan Green, for a passage in which one character's breasts are compared to "a pair of Danishes" and another's to "two Space Hoppers."
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