It was the shower hose that clinched it. A passage from his debut novel, Winkler, describing a male character’s genitalia as “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath” won the 13th annual Literary Review award for Bad Sex in Fiction for food-critic-turned-novelist Giles Coren last night.

Coren beat off heavyweight competition for the prize with an unpunctuated 138-word description of coitus, followed by the two-word sentence, “like Zorro”. Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paul Theroux and John Updike were among the 11 contenders for this year’s prize, with Rushdie, Theroux and Updike all boasting previous nominations.

I’m certain the abstinence crowd won’t approve!