Did Morrissey deserve to win the 2015 bad sex award?

He may have won the bad sex award, but there are other writers on the nomination list who make Morrissey sound remarkably coy

When Arctic Monkeys won the Mercury prize in 2006, frontman Alex Turner’s reaction was to say “Somebody call 999!” on the grounds that a worthier winner on the shortlist had been “robbed”. Had Morrissey turned up to collect the Literary Review’s bad sex award this week, he might have said the same, for, in terms of the prize’s rubric and the evidence offered on the night, it wasn’t obvious how he emerged on top.

The former Smiths singer and lyricist clearly merited his place on the shortlist for the scene in his debut novel, List of the Lost, in which Eliza and Ezra form “one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation … a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth”. By sex-writing standards, however, this is remarkably coy and vague; the scene’s jumble of daft metaphors avoids the detailing of bodily moves and the anatomical terms that previous winners have revelled in – Eliza’s vagina mysteriously becomes “the otherwise central zone”; Ezra’s penis (which somehow “whacked and smacked” the rest of her, as if detachable) his “bulbous salutation”.

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