How do you write about sex? The mummy porn novel Fifty Shades of Grey has made the subject of sex fashionable again, but how do you write about sex in fiction? Man Booker prize-winning author John Banville believes that sex "arises from the situation, the characters, the plot... It's not something you set out to do. Rachel Johnson, whose book Shire Hell was the winner of the bad sex in fiction award in 2008, told the Today programme that literary fiction can "convey the intimacy and authenticity" of the act rather than describe the "actual physical calisthenics."