Manil Suri, a novelist and mathematician,won the annual Britishprize for a passage in his novel‘The City of Devi’.
LONDON: An out-of-this-world sexscene invoking stars, supernovas and statisticianshas won US-based writer ManilSuri the ‘uncoveted’ Bad Sex in FictionAward.Suri, a novelist and mathematician,won the annual British prize for a passagein his novel ‘The City of Devi’, inwhich the characters “streak like superheroespast suns and solar systems, we divethrough shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei”.The passage climaxes: “In celebrationof our breakthrough fourth star, statisticiansthe world over rejoice.”Suri, a professor of mathematics atthe University of Maryland, was not onhand on Tuesday to accept his award inperson. A representative of his publisher,Bloomsbury, accepted the prize from former‘Dynasty’ star Joan Collins at a ceremonyin London.‘The City of Devi’, Suri’s third novel,is the story of a love triangle set in Mumbai,which has been threatened with nuclearapocalypse.The book’s publisher pointed out thatsome reviewers had praised the novel’s sexscenes, which the Times Literary Supplementcalled “unfettered, quirky, beautiful,tragic and wildly experimental”.Suri beat other finalists includingSusan Choi, Rupert Thompson and folksinger Woody Guthrie, nominated for theposthumously published novel ‘House ofEarth’.The tongue-in-cheek award wasfounded in 1993 to name and shameauthors of “crude, badly written or perfunctorypassages of sexual descriptionin contemporary novels”. It is run by theLiterary Review magazine.Previous recipients of the dubioushonour, usually accepted with good grace,include Sebastian Faulks, the late NormanMailer and the late John Updike, who wasawarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievementaward in 2008.
