David Gutherson awarded Bad Sex in Fiction Award from Literary Review magazine

London, United Kingdom (WJT) – In this year’s Literary Review, the British literary magazine awarded the Bad Sex in Fiction Award to author David Gutherson for an excerpt in his book Ed King, which is a new take on the Sophocles classic Oedipus the King (or Oedipus Rex).

Other nominees included:

• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami,
• The Great Night by Chris Adrian,
• The Affair by Lee Child and
• The Final Testament of the Holy Bible by James Frey.

All are exceptional writers who share two things in common aside from their occupation: the inability to write effective and engaging sex scenes and the fact that they’re all male.

Eighteen authors have been awarded the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Sixteen of those awardees are male and only two are female. Wendy Perriam (2002) and Rachel Johnson (2008) are the two female authors who’ve won the award.

Rowan Pelling of The Guardian wrote a piece tackling the reasons why male authors are bad at writing sex scenes. According to Pelling, women are better writers of sex scenes because they dig deep within their own sexual experiences “in pursuit of genuinely erotic prose.”

Women are more sincere and genuine when writing about sex while men are the complete opposite. Male scribes simply avoid “applying themselves with that degree of naked sincerity.”