The Literary Review has announced its eight front-runners for the prestigious “Bad Sex in Fiction” award, which includes Morrissey’s first novel, List of the Lost, The Guardian reports.

The UK-based magazine began distributing the award to authors who have produced “an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel” in 1993 and has awarded the prize each year since. It was established by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, former editor of Literary Review.

One of the books, however, has fallen off the list. “Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott’s Call me Dave was brought to the judges’ attention because of its suggestion that the ‘the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth,’” the judges said in a statement. “That assertion was so flimsily corroborated as to resemble fiction, but, regrettably, the biographers displayed insufficient literary brio to merit serious consideration.”

The other books on the list include Erica Jong’s Fear of Dying, Richard Bausch’s Before, During, After, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Making of Zombie Wars, Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, Tomas Espedal’s Against Nature, and Lauren Groff’s National Book Award-nominated Fates and Furies.

“He shut his eyes and thought of mangoes, split papayas, fruits tart and sweet and dripping with juice, and then it was off, and he groaned and his whole body turned sweet,” reads an excerpt from Groff’s Fates and Furies.

Last year, Ben Okri took the prize for a sex scene featuring a rocket going off, and John Updike took the prize in 2008 for his novel, The Widows of Eastwick.

The Literary Review will announce the winner of the “Bad Sex in Fiction” award at the aptly named venue, London’s In and Out Club, on December 1.

Photo Credit: Alex Proimos, Creative Commons.