AA Gill's novel Starcrossed was the winner of the Bad Sex In Fiction Award for 1999 beating off stiff competition from the likes of Julie Burchill, Amanda Platell, Isabel Allende ("the rosy, perky gherkin revealed before her eyes did not frighten her") and both Salman Rushdie and his former wife, Marianne Wiggins.
The award, now in its seventh year, is for "the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel".
"He has pretensions, which is important," Auberon Waugh, editor of the Literary Review, said about this year's winner. "I mean Julie Burchill isn't strictly a literary writer at all, just between you and me, and Amanda Platell couldn't be described as literature in any sense of the word, but AA Gill does have pretensions to literature - and he does really write very badly."
The judges deemed Mr AA Gill peerless for the following passage from his novel Starcrossed (Doubleday)
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'...His tongue is long and hard and tastes of mint. We don't say anything, but he pushes me to my knees in the middle of the shop. It's difficult to undo his flies. I put my hand in. It's hot and damp, and then, Christ; it's amazing, huge. It just goes on and on, as thick as...'
'As a magnum? A jeroboam? A methuselah? A bitter pump?'
'A fucking salami. Shut up, John.'
***
'...he takes his clothes off until he's just wearing his boots. I hook my nails into his really taut bottom and he pumps and nearly chokes me.'
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'How did he get his trousers off over his boots? I mean, does he take his boots off and put them back on again?'
'Shut up. I pull my dress off and I'm naked. He reaches down and roughly grabs me between the legs. I can feel his long, bony finger slip inside me. His thumb slides into the crack of my bottom and lifts me like...'
'A bowling ball? A six-pack?'
'Like I was light as a feather.'
***
She got to his cock and stuck it between her teeth like a cigar...
Mr Gill had also been shortlisted two years back and was said to be very keen to ensure that he got the award this time. Knowing that the Cigar makers Hamlet were sponsoring the award, critics say, his passage was cleverly aimed at winning the award.
His book not only contains such descriptions as, "the rash-rubbed thighs clamped cheeks, bits of liverish flesh draped across his nose and coarse hair scraped his chin. There seemed to be such a lot of her...", but also includes a deep-sea encounter between a scuba-diver and a 'genetically-modified, homosexually-inclined giant squid'.
