AN ITALIAN NOVELIST, poet and translator has been given the dubious award of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize for 2016.

Erri De Luca, a man once described by a critic in his native Italy as ”the writer of the decade”, was not at tonight’s ceremony to pick up the award.

Last year the award was won by former Smiths frontman Morrissey.

De Luca beat off competition from five other writers to win the 2016 award, former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis among them.

The ‘winning’ passage from De Luca’s book The Day Before Happiness was read out at the awards ceremony this evening. Read it at your own risk:

My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach. With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her. She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my prick against her opening. I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.

She pushed on my hips, an order that thrust me in. I entered her. Not only my prick, but the whole of me entered her, into her guts, into her darkness, eyes wide open, seeing nothing. My whole body had gone inside her. I went in with her thrusts and stayed still. While I got used to the quiet and the pulsing of my blood in my ears and nose, she pushed me out a little, then in again. She did it again and again, holding me with force and moving me to the rhythm of the surf. She wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick.

Read: Morrissey’s writing about sex is so bad he was given an award >

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