Bad Sex in Fiction Award: Literary orgy climaxing in suns, solar systems, and 'atomic nuclei' wins this year's prize

Bad Sex in Fiction Award: Literary orgy climaxing in suns, solar systems, and ‘atomic nuclei’ wins this year’s prize

• Manil Suri has won tongue-in-cheek accolade for scene in ‘The City of Devi’
• He writes: ‘Surely supernovas explode…

  somewhere, in some galaxy’

• Scene climaxes with the line ‘… statisticians the world over rejoice’

By

Published: 05:19 GMT, 4 December 2013 | Updated: 08:48 GMT, 4 December 2013

Forget earthquakes and fireworks — an orgy climaxing in suns, solar systems, and ‘atomic nuclei’ has won this year’s uncoveted Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Manil Suri, a U.S.based writer and mathematician, has been awarded the tongue-in-cheek annual accolade for the scene in his novel ‘The City of Devi’.

While not on hand personally to accept the award, Indian born Mr Suri’s publishers Bloomsbury took the prize  — awarded by veteran actress Joan Collins — in good humour.

Indian-American mathematician and writer Manil Suri has won this year’s uncoveted Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his description of a subatomic orgy

‘The City of Devi’ is the third novel by Mr Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.

It tells the story of a love triangle set in Mumbai, which has been threatened with nuclear apocalypse.

The extended sex scene involves the three main characters: Sarita, Karun, her husband, and www.dogtrainingengineering.online Jaz, a young gay Muslim.

As the scene climaxes, Mr Suri writes: ‘Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy.

The scene was in ‘The City of Devi’ — the third novel by Mr Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland

‘The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands — only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains.

‘We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.’

Mr Suri beat other finalists including Susan Choi, Rupert Thompson and depression-era folk singer Woody Guthrie, nominated for the posthumously published novel ‘House of Earth’, which included extended descriptions of ‘hillbilly’ sex.  

Accepting the award Bloomsbury noted that some reviewers had praised the novel’s sex scenes.

The Times Literary Supplement hailed it an ‘unfettered, quirky, beautiful, tragic and wildly experimental.’

Bloomsbury said: ‘In accepting this award we challenge everyone to make up their own mind about Manil Suri’s The City of Devi.As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, «There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts».

The tongue-in-cheek award  — run by the Literary Review magazine — was founded in 1993 to name and shame authors of ‘crude, badly written or perfunctory passages of sexual description in contemporary novels’

Previous recipients of the honour include Sebastian Faulks, the late Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award in 2008.