Author of The City of Devi wins Literary Review prize thanks to threesome set in nuclear-threatened Mumbai
Among the pools of sweat, ripe brie, knotted vines, shoals of quarks, hot stones, damp glades and chocolatey tobacco grasped at by the authors in their panting but doomed attempts to convey the urgency and passion of sex, it was the exploding supernovas of Manil Suri's third novel, The City of Devi, which clinched for him the most dreaded prize on the literary circuit: the Literary Review bad sex prize.
Suri - who has previously been longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Faulkner awards - lives in the US, where he is professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. He was unable to attend the prize ceremony, but a representative of his publisher, Bloomsbury, accepted it on his behalf. It was presented by Joan Collins – who has unaccountably never won the prize herself despite her many novels and memoirs – in a ceremony attended by 400 guests at the Naval and Military Club in London: the club is generally known as the In & Out.
Devi was in a competitive field this year, and defeated a book written in 1947 by a man who died in 1967, the musician Woody Guthrie, the Guardian readers' favourite. However the judges were seduced by the climax of a sex scene - set in a curfewed Mumbai under threat of a nuclear bomb - involving all three of his main characters: Sarita, her physicist husband Karun, and a young gay man: "Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun's body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice."
His publishers responded to the honour by inviting readers to take the book to bed.
"In accepting this award we challenge everyone to make up their own mind about Manil Suri's The City of Devi. As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, 'There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts' Take The City of Devi home to bed with you tonight and discover sex scenes that the TLS praised as 'unfettered, quirky, beautiful, tragic and wildly experimental', written by an author who, according to the Wall Street Journal, 'captures the insecurity, the curiosity and even the comedy of those vulnerable moments'. As Jane Austen observed: 'One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.'"
The prize was launched in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh, to "draw attention to crude, badly written, or perfunctory use of passages of sexual description in contemporary novels - and to discourage it'. Past winners include Tom Wolfe, Rachel Johnson, Giles Coren, AA Gill and Norman Mailer, and in 2008 John Updike was awarded a lifetime achievement prize.
An early favourite to join this year's shortlist, the return to neurotic form of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, was judged "not quite cringeworthy enough".
Woody Guthrie, best known for his folk and leftwing protest songs, made the shortlist 46 years after his death, and became the clear Guardian readers' favourite to take the prize. House of Earth, written in 1947, was only published for the first time in the past year - with an introduction by the actor Johnny Depp, and a love scene, lasting 30 pages, which is literally a roll in the hay: "Back and forth, side to side, they moved on their bed on the hay. Back and forth, side to side, they moved their hips, their feet, their legs, their whole bodies. Their arms tied into knots like vines climbing trees, and the trees moved and swayed, and there was a time and a rhythm to the blend of the movement."
The judges also noted admiringly Eric Reinhardt, in The Victoria System: 'The zip of her skirt sputtered between her fingernails like a motorboat on a waveless sea … My erection beat time in my underwear."
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