Her compatriot Erri de Luca – author of over 50 books, many outselling Ferrante in Italian – traverses similar terrain in this 2009 novel, following a young orphan’s life in a Neapolitan apartment block “full of walled-up trapdoors, secret passageways, crimes and passions”.
– Italian writer Erri De Luca had already won the 2013 European Prize for Literature and been hailed as "the writer of the decade," so what else was left to accomplish but win the 2016 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. De Luca took home the 24th annual prize for some less-than-steamy passages from his novel The Day Before Happiness, the Press Association reports. According to the Guardian, those passages include “My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach" and, "[Their] sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe." De Luca joins prestigious, bad-sex-writing past winners like Morrissey, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, the AP reports. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award was created by the Literary Review magazine to "draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction” to encourage authors to do better. De Luca's competition this year definitely fit that description, with passages like "The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced" and, "I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better." De Luca declined to accept the award in person.