First timer takes bad sex award

Twenty Something is Hollingshead's debut novel

Iain Hollingshead has won the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2006 with his first novel Twenty Something.

Now in its 13th year, the award is given to the passage considered to be the most redundant in an otherwise excellent novel.

The panel admitted it was a close call against Tim Willocks' The Religion but Hollingshead's reference to "bulging trousers" tipped the scales.

The 26-year-old said he was delighted to be the youngest recipient.

Hollingshead, who is due to accept the award at London's Naval & Military Club in London, added: "I hope to win it every year."

The judges said the award's mandate is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".

Everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles Iain Hollingshead, Twenty Something

The ceremony will include a reading of all the nominated passages by two actresses and the award itself - an abstract statue representing sex in the 1950s - is to be presented by rocker Courtney Love.

Among the other nominees were established names like Irvine Welsh and Will Self but the panel described them as "beyond help at this point".

Adding perspective to the event was the fact two nominees, David Mitchell with Black Swan Green and Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother are also in the running for the £25,000 Costa - formerly Whitbread - novel award.

Previous winners of the bad sex prize include AA Gill, Sebastian Faulks and Tom Wolfe. Wolfe was one of the few who declined to receive his award in person.