Manil Suri has won the 21st Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for The City of Devi (Bloomsbury). The prize was presented by Joan Collins at a ceremony in London on Tuesday night. The prize highlights embarrassing or redundant erotic scenes in novels.
The City of Devi is set in Bombay as the city is under the threat of a nuclear bomb. It follows three characters: Sarita, her husband Karun and Jaz, a young gay Muslim. The judges were won over by the climax of an extended sex scene involving all three characters:
“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”
The City of Devi is Suri’s third work. He has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.
His publisher Bloomsbury said: “In accepting this award we challenge everyone to make up their own mind about Manil Suri’s The City of Devi. As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, ‘There are as many kinds of love as there are hearts’.”
