'Open your thighs,' he urged as he parted the folds of her vulva.

'You are so moist down there.' He stroked and probed her with two fingers as she felt her blood waken. He raised himself to his knees and bent to roll his tongue around her weeping orifice. He was bringing her to a pitch of ecstasy when she heard Madame Veuve, on the landing, put down the supper tray. Whiffs of onion soup strayed over them as he engulfed her. 'Don't stop,' she clamoured; she was nearly there, it was in the bag.
"Triptych of a Young Wolf" by Ann Allestree

The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award is possibly the only literary competition in which a first-time novelist like Iain Hollingshead, with his 2006 debut "Twentysomething," could edge out Thomas Pynchon.

Each year, the British review culls a long list of offensive passages from the year’s published novels. They're offensive not in the sense of breaking societal norms — though there is some of that — but guilty of being just bad, bad writing. Judges have the arduous task of reading and re-reading the selections to determine the cream of the crop (no pun intended), then choosing a winner. (I imagine it’s similar to the duty of the Cosmopolitan editor who gets to excerpt beach-and-beauty-salon novels for the magazine’s “Red Hot Reads” feature.) Sometimes the honor is awarded posthumously, as with Norman Mailer’s 2007 prize for a particularly uncomfortable passage in his Hitler novel, “The Castle in the Forest."

The actual sex isn’t always bad; most of these scenes are descriptive of (the author’s idea of) sheer hair-pulling, toe-curling ecstasy. It’s the writing that’s cringe-inducing. Common to most of these literary culprits are extended metaphors, especially animal metaphors (the most recent winner, Rachel Johnson’s “Shire Hell,” included at least three bestial references), and word choice that makes the act seem nothing but … clinical. Fantasies of bursting into millions of tiny particles upon orgasm are popular too.

“Do you think these authors write from experience?” asked a friend who first introduced me to the award series via links to The Guardian’s annual reportage of the awards event. (The quickest way to find these awkwardly naughty bits is to visit guardian.co.uk’s book section or literaryreview.co.uk.)

“Do you think they narrate the act?” I wanted to know, while parsing through past shortlists where lovers moaned and groaned through Mao Tse-tung’s teachings and lobsters experienced inter-special romance. Art imitating life, maybe.

But amount of experience, sexual or authorial, isn’t what determines what will result in an especially flabbergasting read.

While the nominated passages often come from newly or less published authors, past winners include literary lions such as Tom Wolfe and Mailer. The 2005 class of nominees alone included John Updike (who received a lifetime achievement award for four consecutive nominations), Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux — not to mention a book co-authored by Marlon Brando.

The Literary Review isn’t rewarding bad writing. Instead, with tongue forcefully in cheek, it encourages bad writers — or good writers who write bad sex scenes — to step up their game.

In an interview with this year’s winner, Johnson (sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson) actually praised the award for discouraging authors from using “awful phrases.”

"The truth is that anyone who writes sex scenes has (the award) at the back of their mind," she said. "It makes you even more self-conscious when you're lubricating your book with sex."

But what separates good sex in fiction from bad, or good from bad metaphor for that matter? Let us compare Johnson’s passage with Phillip Roth’s from his new novel "Indignation" — both involve a cat at a milk bowl.