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Okri wins 2014 Bad S-x in Fiction Award for ‘The Age of Magic’

Booker Prize winner Ben Okri has won this year’s UK Literary Review Bad S-x in Fiction Award for his 10th novel The Age of Magic (Head of Zeus). Okri’s book was selected from a shortlist of 10 titles that included The Snow Queen (Michael Cunningham, HarperCollins); The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Richard Flanagan, Vintage); The Hormone Factory (Saskia Goldschmidt, Other Press); Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami, Harvill Secker); The Affairs of Others (Amy Grace Loyd, Orion); Desert God (Wilbur Smith, HarperCollins); Things to Make and Break (May-Lan Tan, Future Tense); The Lemon Grove (Helen Walsh, Tinder Press); and The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle (Kirsty Wark, Hodder). Okri’s ‘ecstatic’ love scene features a stray rocket going off ‘somewhere in the night’ and acquaints the female protagonist Mistletoe with ‘places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour’. According to the Guardian, Okri was unable to attend the prize ceremony for the tongue-in-cheek award but issued a ‘terse and less than ecstatic’ statement, claiming ‘a writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it’. His editor, Maggie McKernan, reflected: ‘Winning the award is fun but a bit undignified, just like s-x, assuming you do it properly.’ The Bad S-x in Fiction Award was established in 1993 to draw attention to the ‘crude, badly written or perfunctory use of passage of s-xual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it’. Last year the prize was awarded to Manil Suri for The City of Devi (Bloomsbury).

 

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Category: International news