Author of the week: Rowan Somerville

last updated 8 January 2015

“With one killer sentence,” Irish novelist Rowan Somerville easily snared this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, said Maev Kennedy in the London Guardian. At last week’s prize ceremony, judges for London’s Literary Review indicated that they were particularly taken by a single passage in Somerville’s otherwise well-received second novel, The Shape of Her. In it, one of the male protagonist’s fumbling attempts at pleasing his beloved is likened to “a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin.” Somerville accepted the unsought attention in good spirits. “I mean, it is describing bad sex,” he says. He even showed up to accept his award. “There is nothing more English than bad sex,” he told the crowd. “So on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.”

Somerville had less reason to be embarrassed than the presenters do, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Sniggering at authors’ attempts to describe physical intimacy, year after year, tells writers that a major part of human experience is out of bounds. Somerville himself hinted at this problem. In an NPR interview, he quoted a bit of Nabokov to prove that sex passages from even the most revered novelists sound “quite silly” when read out of context. One source of comfort, he notes, has been that past Bad Sex winners, and even some of this year‘s runners-up, are writers he admires. To be on the same list with Jonathan Franzen, he says, was “a huge consolation.”