Third time 'lucky' for bad sex winner

And it was third time "lucky" for the author who has the misfortune of being nominated three times in row.

Some of the biggest names in literature had been nominated for the title, including Will Self and Nicholas Coleridge.

The prize recognises writers of the worst descriptions of a sex act in a contemporary novel.

It was Perriam's Tread Softly novel which the judges at the Literary Review deemed the worst offender for writing about love-making.

She will be handed her trophy, which is a semi-abstract statue representing sex in the 1950s, by interior designer and socialite Nicky Haslam at an awards ceremony in London on Tuesday.

Robert Posner of the Literary Review said Perriam's book stood out from the rest because "they had never before heard of pin-striped genitalia", although he admitted the committee of judges were confused as to what it actually meant.

'Dorsal subluxation'

"She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers," writes Perriam in her book.

"The jargon he'd used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk... dorsal subluxation, flexion deformity of the first metatarsal," it continues.

The annual award is organised by the Literary Review, and was founded by the literary critics Rhoda Koenig and the late Auberon Waugh in 1993.

The aim of the prize 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".

Others authors short-listed for the prize included actor and writer Ethan Hawke for Black Wednesday, Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White and Whitbread nominee Hari Kunzru for The Impressionist.