What it's like to 'win' Bad Sex prize

What it's like to 'win' Bad Sex prize: "

I can't say I was thrilled to get this travesty of a literary award, but at least it's working hard to publicise my novel

Last Monday I was in Paris when the Literary Review emailed me with the irritating news that I was the favourite to 'win' the 2010 Bad Sex award. 'Quel honneur' I quipped , relieved there was an international frontier, a channel of water, and 950 years of bad blood between me and this unwelcome dishonour. Emails of increasing desperation followed, culminating in the news that I was in fact the … er ... winner.

How annoying, I thought. Here was my novel The Shape of Her, highly commended in review by literary heavyweights such as the Guardian, Irish Times , Economist and many of them, including the respected Boyd Tonkin of the Independent, pointing to the treatment of sex in the work as of particular merit … and yet here was a tiny magazine, hardly known beyond this award, deciding to make me infamous as a writer who couldn't write about sex.

It's a hard pill to swallow. It takes years to write a novel and, if you are serious about what you do, quite a lot of sacrifice. Furthermore, despite the excellent reviews, The Shape of Her had not sold well: to be honest it had disappeared. No, the last thing I was going to do was throw myself into a pit of baying toffs – the magazine started by Auberon Waugh is renowned for drawing its staff from the upper classes – and add public humiliation to my disappointment.

In October, well before the shortlist was announced, an article by Susana Rustin in the Guardian had quoted me criticising the Bad Sex award: 'It reminds me of a bunch of sniggering sixth-formers in the back of the class. There's a kind of English notion of sexuality that I wish we could get away from, it's Benny Hill, it's page 3 …'

Despite the magazine's assertion that 'it's only a bit of fun' there's an atmosphere of bullying peculiar to public schools about the whole thing. If you decline to show up, like the excellent Sebastian Faulks, they harangue you for years. But we all know what you have to do with bullies, so I got on the train and presented myself at the Army and Navy Cub in St James's Square on Monday night at 8pm.

A palatial room with excessive chandeliers was stuffed to the brim with champagne swilling revelers. I was welcomed by the editor of the mag (a person whose view on sex in literature is that it 'just doesn't work, I don't think there are any cases where it works') and introduced to the genuinely charming Alexander Waugh who congratulates me for having the pluck to turn up and assures me that there's to be no humiliation. Moments later, I find myself in front of a stage where he and a couple of actresses are entertaining the audience, mawkishly reading out the sex bits in the shortlisted novels.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas gets a particularly good drubbing, complete with mock-Australian accents, and then an extremely brave passage from Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is pulled out of context and held up to the hilarity of not quite all. These happen to be two of my favourite novels and I am glad the authors aren't here to witness the unjust pillorying.

They have a great time with my novel, belting out a compilation of sex from the whole work with leering innuendo. I'm announced as the winner and I shake hands with a frail Michael Winner and face the audience. I have in mind a few words to say to the audience about what a travesty the whole thing is … but as I survey the faces before me , it's clear it's a waste of time. They are just people out for a good night, no more or less. So instead I say: 'There's nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of a nation, I thank you,' and leave the stage smiling.

My novel has lots of sex in it because it is about sex. Its real title was Sex That Lasts For Years but the publishers wouldn't allow it. Despite appearing to be a love story, it's really about how the scars of childhood abuse affect later relationships and it's based on two people's real experience – so it's been quite hard to see lines wrenched out of context and picked up by the press around the world. I do not blame the personable Alexander Waugh or the editors of the Literary Review who judge the prize, as I am aware that most of them had not read the book and their publication survives on the publicity this award generates.

But let's be frank … this ridiculous award had put my novel in newspapers and websites across the world and although, when the deputy editor of the mag emailed me to ask if I'd enjoyed the party, I replied 'as much as a televised visit to a proctologist', I don't think the publicity is going to do me, or the book, any harm either. So although it surprises me to say it, I am very grateful to them."