London, Dec 1 (ANI): Jonathan Littell, the American winner of the Prix Goncourt, has won the Literary Review’s 2009 bad sex in fiction award for his novel ‘The Kindly Ones’.

The tome, which narrates the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, bagged the award beating the works of the likes of Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave.

The judges paid tribute to the novel’s breadth and ambition, calling it “in part, a work of genius”.

“However, a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as ‘I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg’ clinched the award for The Kindly Ones. We hope he takes it in good humour,” the citation continued,” the Guardian quoted his citation.

Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review said that Littell’s book is the first work in translation to win the award.

Auberon Waugh started the award in 1993 to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.

‘The Kindly Ones’ was originally written in French, where it was published as ‘Les bienveillantes’ in 2006, and went on to sell more than 1million copies across the continent and win the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honour. (ANI)