Bad Sex Prize Up for Grabs

LONDON (Reuters) - The winner of Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2002 will be named Tuesday, with hunchbacks taking on flamingos for the country's least coveted literary award.

Eleven novelists have been nominated for the 10th annual award which aims to highlight and discourage "crude, tasteless and often perfunctory" sex scenes.

Hollywood actor and writer Ethan Hawke makes the shortlist along with British author Will Self and publisher Nicholas Coleridge.

Jeffrey Eugenides' acclaimed comic epic "Middlesex" boasts one of the most memorable passages, recalling Victor Hugo's tragic creation the "Hunchback of Notre Dame."

It reads: "I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope."

Will Self turned to nature for his memorable love scene in "Dorian," a reworking of Oscar Wilde's classic "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

"They were like two flamingos, each attempting to filter the nutriment out of the other with great slurps of their muscular tongues."

Coleridge looked to the stars for his sex scene in "Godchildren."

"This was so wrong, it was all so wrong, but Mary's strength to resist was ebbing away; she was like a tiny meteor drawn into the orbit of some great planet."

Ethan Hawke, who starred in the films "Dead Poets Society" and "Snow Falling on Cedars," set his sex scene from the novel "Ash Wednesday" in a car parked outside a bus station.

"I knew I had reached the moment my life had been waiting for. I was going to be a father and a husband. I spanked her bottom and cranked up the tunes."

Past winners of the awards, organized by the Literary Review magazine, include broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg, critic and writer A.A. Gill and novelist Sebastian Faulks.