Bad sex wins awards...

The simple fact that this award exists is sheer brilliance.

John Updike has won a lifetime achievement award for bad sex in fiction.

Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction award is handed out each year to honour (or not) the author of the year's worst sex scene in fiction.

Mr. Updike has never won the annual award, but this year the good people responsible for the award judged it only appropriate to give him the lifetime achievement nod for four years of consecutive nominations. He's like the Susan Lucci of bad sex.

The prize has been awarded annually since 1993 to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it."

The strictly erotic or pornographic is ineligible; this is an entirely literary pursuit.

Here are excerpts from some of this years nominees. The winner is Rachel Johnson's Shire Hell. She was awarded a plaster foot.