Author Rowan Somerville won literature's little-coveted Bad Sex in Fiction Prize on Monday for the use of unsettling insect imagery in his novel The Shape of Her.
Judges of the annual literary award said they were especially impressed by a passage comparing lovemaking to "a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect."
The animal imagery continues elsewhere in the novel, a tale of desire and memory set on a Greek island. One character's fingers are described as "tender enough to hold a tiny bird".
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
The prize, founded in 1993 by Literary Review magazine, aims to draw attention to "the crude, tasteless, and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels".
Somerville, who was born in Britain and lives in Ireland, took his victory in good humour, noting that "there is nothing more English than bad sex".
He said he was honoured to be shortlisted alongside authors like Australia's Christos Tsiolkas - for The Slap - and American writer Jonathan Franzen, nominated for the best-selling Freedom.
Previous winners include such literary heavyweights as Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a lifetime achievement Bad Sex prize in 2008.
Last year's winner was The Kindly Ones by American author Jonathan Littell, which described a sex act as "a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg".
