Author Wolfe wins 'bad sex' prize

Author Tom Wolfe's latest novel is about hedonistic college life

US author Tom Wolfe has been given the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for awkward descriptions of intimate encounters in his novel I am Charlotte Simmons.

Wolfe, 74, whose Bonfire of the Vanities epitomised 1980s power and excess, was nominated for three passages in his latest publication.

One included the line: "...moan moan moan moan moan..."

The prize is awarded each year for "crude, tasteless" sexual depictions in published literature.

It is awarded by Literary Review magazine in an attempt to discourage authors from writing such accounts.

In I am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe steps into the shoes of a young, sheltered female student getting to grips with sex and hedonism on campus.

One of his winning passages is:

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns.

Oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now! She must say 'No, Hoyt' and talk to him like a dog...

I am Charlotte Simmons is the 14th book from Wolfe, who came to the fore in the 1960s with journalism accounts such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Will Self, Julian Fellowes, Andre Brink and Wendy Perriam were among those nominated for the award this year.

Perriam has now been nominated four times and won in 2002. AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Melvyn Bragg are among the other winners in the award's 12-year history.