mordant wit

Food-critic-turned-novelist Giles Coren won one of Britain's most dreaded literary accolades on Thursday -- the prize for bad sex in fiction.

The prize is awarded each year "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."

Coren won it for a raunchy passage from his debut novel "Winkler" which included a description of the main character's penis "leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath."

"It was the overexcited shower ... which clinched the deal for Giles Coren," judges said. "That and the endlessly long sentence, which squirms and wriggles like the shower head."

Coren, better known as restaurant critic for the Times newspaper, fought off competition from several well-known authors including former Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie and U.S. travel and fiction writer Paul Theroux.

The winner of the award, organized by the London-based Literary Review, is given an Oscar-style statuette and a bottle of champagne -- but only if he or she comes to the awards ceremony in person.

Organizers said Coren was expected to attend.