Female authors have managed to avoid including bad sex scenes in their novels this year - at least according to the Literary Review, which has announced an all-male shortlist for that least-coveted of literary prizes, the Bad sex in fiction award.
The spokesperson for this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award explains why literary copulation is so often terrible.
While most people can pretty deftly articulate the elements of bad sex-premature ejaculation, vaginal dryness, crying-the elements of bad sex writing can be harder to pin down, even if you know it when you see it.
In the past year, the Earth has traveled around the sun, the moon has waxed and waned, the tree leaves have sprouted and fallen again, and more terrible sex writing has been produced. Read more
The sweat, the groans, the spasming muscles, the licked ears and other bits, the pendulous breasts and other bits; it can only be time for the bad sex prize, established 23 years ago by the Literary Review "to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them". Read more
Ben Okri has won the 22nd annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for The Age of Magic (Head of Zeus). The prize was presented by the Reverend Richard Coles, former member of chart-topping band The Communards, presenter of Saturday Live and latterly a Church of England priest who served as the inspiration for TV's Rev. Read more
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers