A couple of years ago, as I tend to tell people quite a lot, I wrote a novel, Overexposure. I wanted it to make a splash. So, thinking myself rather clever, I included a deliberately awful sex scene, specifically to attract the attentions of Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award. If I could concoct a sex scene toe-curling enough to earn me a place alongside past winners such as Lord Bragg, Sebastian Faulks, A. A. Gill, Tom Wolfe and Giles Coren, I would have made that splash. So I really laid it on. A girl drops to her knees as her paramour recites a list of chic London restaurants. Pretty hateful, right? I reckoned I was a shoo-in.

Imagine my delight, then, when I heard that my book had been nominated for that very award in 2006. Then imagine my dismay when I heard that the nomination was for an entirely different passage, set on a billiard table. This one I had meant from the heart. Or, at least, if not the gut, then an area near by.

Theoretically, the Literary Review claims that the prize is “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. I’m not sure that really worked out, in my case.

By the time you read this, this year’s winner will have been announced. Nominees include Jeanette Winterson (The Stone Gods), Ali Smith (Girl Meets Boy) and the late Norman Mailer (The Castle in the Forest). It’s hard to imagine that any of them will have written their sexy bits with the prize in mind, but you never know. Anyway, in practice, you win by either being very famous, or by turning up. (Last year, I was on holiday.) Either way, it’s the nomination that counts; whichever bit it is for.

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