I don't usually like to cut and paste, but I couldn't resist this little gem.

US author and journalist Tom Wolfe has won one of the world's most dreaded literary accolades - the British 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".

Wolfe won it for a couple of purple passages from his latest novel I am Charlotte Simmons, a tale of campus life at an exclusive US university.

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue," one of his winning sentences begins.

"But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!"

Judges described Wolfe's prose as "ghastly and boring".

The former Washington Post correspondent, whose debut novel Bonfire of the Vanities was a defining text of the 1980s, fought off stiff competition from 10 other authors including South African Andre Brink, whose novel Before I Forget contains the following description of a woman's vulva:

"[It was] like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end."

Another writer who only narrowly escaped the prize was Britain's Nadeem Aslam for his novel Maps for Lost Lovers, a tale of life in a Muslim community in an English town.

"His mouth looked for the oiled berry," one of his raunchiest passages starts.

"The smell of his armpits was on her shoulders - a flower depositing pollen on a hummingbird's forehead," another reads.

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

Organisers said Wolfe, who is based in New York, was the first writer in the 12-year history of the competition to decline his invitation.

-Reuters