LONDON — It’s not quite the Nobel Prize, but John Updike has a new literary accolade: laureate of bad sex.
Updike, who has a long and graphic history of detailing coupling on the page, won a lifetime achievement award Tuesday from judges of Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, which celebrates crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature.
The judges said Updike had been shortlisted for the prize four times.
“Good sex or bad sex, he has kept us entertained for many years,” they said in a statement. The magazine said it was attempting to contact Updike to tell him the good news.
The 76-year-old American novelist was a finalist for this year’s Bad Sex prize for his description of an explosive oral encounter in his latest book, “The Widows of Eastwick,” but lost out to British writer Rachel Johnson. The Associated Press
