London - The Bad Sex in Fiction Award is not an accolade your average writer would proudly position on their mantle piece.
The Literary Review describes it as an award for an “outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel”.
This year has seen some of the least tantalising words in the award’s history nominated - and they come from Donald Trump.
The President-elect’s “pussy-grabbing” comments might have gained widespread condemnation but they have proved rather fortuitous in this niche literary sphere.
At the beginning of October a leaked tape from 2005 surfaced in which the now President-elect could be heard boasting about groping and making unwanted advances on women.
Trump was nominated by several people for the Bad Sex in Fiction award for his “locker room talk”, but judges rejected the nomination "on the grounds that the award only covers fiction”.
The shortlist of nominees includes Briton Janet Ellis, former presenter of children's TV show Blue Peter,for a raunchy scene in her debut novel, The Butcher’s Hook, the Daily Mail reports.
The Butcher’s Hook is one of six in the running for for the award, won last year by the singer Morrissey and his passage describing a "bulbous salutation".
The other five are US authors Ethan Canin and Gayle Forman, Austrian Robert Seethaler, Italian Erri de Luca and filmmaker and writer Tom Connolly.
Ellis, 61, put a brave face on her nomination, saying that she considered it "something of a compliment’ to join the prestigious list of nominees.
Ellis said she had re-read her sex scene and "would stand by it", adding: "I think sex is notoriously difficult to write about because most people who are reading the book will have some experience of it. Obviously you’re trying to find a very new way to describe something old but I actually think I’ve achieved it. If somebody has actually bothered to read through all those sex scenes and mine is one of the ones that has, ahem, stood out, I’m fine with that.
"It was my first novel and first time writing about sex. It all sounds like a Carry On film now but I did think long and hard.’
Set in London in the 18th century, Ellis’s dark thriller tells the story of Anne Jaccob, the eldest daughter of comfortably-off parents. The panel of five judges at the Literary Review singled out a passage in which Anne consummates her relationship with butcher’s apprentice Fub.
On its website, the Literary Review said that in the flood of nominations, its attention had been particularly caught by several passages from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am, including lines such as: "He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure."
But this didn't make the grade, any more that Donald Trump.
* The winner of this year’s award will be announced on November 30.
The Independent, Daily Mail, IOL