Jonathan Littell, whose 2006 novel Les bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) was a Prix Goncourt winner, has been named this year's recipient of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the same work. In topping a distinguished shortlist that included Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and Nick Cave, Littell's book also became the first translated work to win the prize.
While praising the novel as "in part, a work of genius," the judges also noted that "a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as 'I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg' clinched the award for The Kindly Ones. We hope he takes it in good humour," the Guardian reported.