Bad sex award for Mailer novel

The late Norman Mailer on Tuesday won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award from Britain’s Literary Review, becoming the first author posthumously lampooned for writing the year’s most atrociously torrid sex scene.

Mailer, who died this month at age 84, was famous for his macho swagger. The judges paid tribute to his accomplishments and his love of life even as they mocked a particularly earthy description of how Adolf Hitler came to be conceived in his novel, “The Castle in the Forest.”

The Literary Review inaugurated the annual award in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”