Italian author, poet and translator Erri De Luca has added another accolade to his glittering career – although this may be one he would prefer to have avoided. The winner of the 2013 European Prize for Literature, hailed as “writer of the decade” by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2009, has won the 24th annual Literary Review Bad sex award for a passage in his novel The Day Before Happiness. 
 
 Bad sex award 2016: the contenders in quotes Read more 
 
 De Luca’s win was announced at a ceremony at the appropriately named In and Out club in London on Wednesday night. The excerpt that swayed the judges involved the Neapolitan orphan protagonist and a mysterious woman he has watched from afar. 
 
 He writes: “My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach. With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her. She opened her legs, pulled up her dress and, holding my hips over her, pushed my prick against her opening. I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.” 
 
 De Luca was unable to attend and his publisher at Allen Lane accepted the prize on his behalf. 
 
 The book beat stiff competition from a shortlist that included former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis for a passage in her bestselling debut The Butchers’ Hook. It likened sex to hanging out wet washing. Ethan Canin was picked for an episode in A Doubter’s Almanac where pneumatic lovers enjoy sex “like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced.” 
 
 In Men Like Air, Tom Connolly presented the eye-watering revelation that “often she cooked exotic meals and put chillies or spices in her mouth while preparing the food and sucked him while the food cooked and then told him to fuck her while his manhood was burning rock-hard with fire.” Leave Me by Gayle Forman, and The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler were also in contention for this year’s prize. 
 
 Despite the sniggers that greet the annual announcement, the Bad sex award was established in 1993 to raise the tone rather than lower it. The then-editor of the Literary Review, Auberon Waugh, hoped the prize would “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”. Since then it has become the one prize literary authors hope to avoid. 
 
 Last year, the singer Morrissey won for a passage in his debut novel List of the Lost, in which the protagonists “sexually violent rotation” was rendered more laughable by the description: “Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.” 
 
 However, De Luca joins an illustrious group of past recipients. As well as Morrissey, bad sex writing by the likes of Melvyn Bragg, Sebastian Faulks, Norman Mailer and Ben Okri has also received the unwelcome accolade. ||||| Here is Francesca Wade's review of The Day Before Happiness, originally published in The Telegraph with the headline: ‘You’re pollen. Obey me, for I am the wind’ 
 
 The atmosphere of Fifties Naples has captured the imagination of millions via Elena Ferrante’s luminous quartet of novels about two girls growing up in a poor neighbourhood, published in English to feverish acclaim over the past few years. Her compatriot Erri de Luca – author of over 50 books, many outselling Ferrante in Italian – traverses similar terrain in this 2009 novel, following a young orphan’s life in a Neapolitan apartment block “full of walled-up trapdoors, secret passageways, crimes and passions”. 
 
 Unlike Ferrante’s epic saga, De Luca’s novel – his first to be translated into English – is concise and elliptical. It starts in our unnamed narrator’s childhood, but swiftly jumps to a heady period when he is 17. Nicknamed “the monkey” for his agile retrieval of stray footballs, the watchful boy lives alone, cared for by the porter Don Gaetano, a sage-like figure who claims he can read people’s thoughts. Over games of cards, Don Gaetano regales the orphan with tales of Second World War resistance: how he tried to sustain a Jewish man who spent the summer of 1943 hiding in a storeroom while above tanks ploughed through shops and Jews were sold to the police. Undetonated bombs, the boy learns, still stud Naples, subterranean relics of a dark past. 
 
 Wartime is richly evoked, but the other strand of the plot, a love story, is less affecting. As a child, the boy was fascinated by a girl he had seen only through a third-floor window. After a decade, she returns to the building. Their ensuing passion is ripe with overblown dialogue (“ ‘Anna, an eternity has passed.’ ‘It’s over. Time begins now, and will last only moments.’ ” “ ‘Can I kiss you?’ ‘No. You’re pollen. Obey me, for I am the wind.’ ”). Anna is mad, it turns out, which explains her mysterious disappearance; beyond that, her condition is never properly explored. Naples itself – simmering with rage and corruption – is the most memorable character in this slightly disjointed novel. 
 
 The Day Before Happiness by Erri de Luca, translated by Jill Foulston, is published by Allen Lane (£9.99, ebook £4.99)
– Italian writer Erri De Luca had already won the 2013 European Prize for Literature and been hailed as "the writer of the decade," so what else was left to accomplish but win the 2016 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. De Luca took home the 24th annual prize for some less-than-steamy passages from his novel The Day Before Happiness, the Press Association reports. According to the Guardian, those passages include “My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach" and, "[Their] sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe." De Luca joins prestigious, bad-sex-writing past winners like Morrissey, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, the AP reports. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award was created by the Literary Review magazine to "draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction” to encourage authors to do better. De Luca's competition this year definitely fit that description, with passages like "The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors. The cheap mattress bounced" and, "I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better." De Luca declined to accept the award in person.