Sex as a 'Dive Through Shoals of Quarks and Atomic Nuclei': Manil Suri Gets Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2013

Indo-American novelist Manil Suri has won the 21st Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his book The City of Devi.

Suri has previously been longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Faulkner awards.

The City of Devi is set in Bombay even as the city is under the threat of a nuclear attack. The novel revolves around the lives of three characters: Sarita, her husband Karun and Jaz, a young gay Muslim.

The judges for the Bad Sex awards found the bold threesome sex scene in the climax of Suri's novel, involving three main characters, worthy of the prize meant for naming and shaming badly written sex scenes in novels.

"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 novelist writes.

"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'," Bloomsbury, which published the book, stated.

Suri, who is of Indian origin, lives in the US, where he is works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland.