Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan a frontrunner for bad sex in fiction award Richard Flanagan accepting the Man Booker literature prize from Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Fresh from winning one of the world's most prestigious literary prize, Australian writer Richard Flanagan is now a frontrunner for an award that recognises the purple prose of fictionalised love-making. Flanagan's masterpiece of love and death set against the perils of the Burma Railway, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is one of eight books shortlisted for London's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award. The offending passage has the characters "circumnavigation of each other" rudely interrupted by the howling of a drooling dog carrying a half dead fairy penguin in its mouth. Australian author Richard Flanagan is possibly about to accept an award of a totally different nature for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Photo: Colin Macdougall "Whatever had held them apart, whatever had restrained their bodies before, was now gone," Flanagan writes. If the earth spun it faltered, if the wind blew it waited. Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world. Flanagan is in fine company for the notorious prize, which rewards "poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description." He is joined by Haruki Murakami's bestseller Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, for an extraordinary metaphor laden threesome in which the movement of torso is compared to drawing a complex diagram in the air, and the two young women's pubic hair "as wet as a rain forest." Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham makes the shortlist for his description of male climax and its abrupt conclusion in The Snow Queen. He lives for seconds in that soaring agonising perfection. It's this, only this, he's lost to himself, he's no one, he's obliterated, there's no Tyler at all, there's only... He hears himself gasp in wonder. He falls into an ecstatic burning harmedness, losing, lost, unmade. And is finished. Ben Okri's The Age of Magic, is nominated for passage in which a woman enjoying intercourse feels "certain now that there was a heaven and that it was here, in her body." The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her. Okri is a previous winner. The veteran novelist Wilbur Smith, a serial offender, is nominated for his novel Desert God, in which a woman's knee-length glowing hair is described as a "rippling curtain" through which her breasts "thrust their way through it like living creatures." They were perfect rounds, white as mare's milk and tipped with ruby nipples that puckered as my gaze passed over them. The journal states the purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them, and is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature. Established by Auberon Waugh in 1993, Britain's most dreaded literary prize has been won by Sebastian Faulks, Norman Mailer and A.A. Gill. The 2014 shortlist includes: The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami The Age of Magic by Ben Okri The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd Desert God by Wilbur Smith Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark