Manil Suri's City of Devi wins Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award

Among the pools of sweat, ripe brie, knotted vines, hot stones, damp glades and chocolatey tobacco in this year's entries, it was the exploding supernovas of Manil Suri's third novel, , that clinched him the most dreaded award in the world of books: the Literary Review bad sex prize.

It was presented by Joan Collins in a ceremony attended by 400 guests at the Naval and Military Club in London: the club is generally known as the In & Out.

Suri - who has previously been longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Faulkner awards - lives in the US, where he is professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. He was unable to attend the prize ceremony, but a representative of his publisher Bloomsbury accepted it on his behalf.

He was in a competitive field this year. However, the judges were seduced by the climax of a sex scene - set in Mumbai under threat of a nuclear bomb - involving his main characters: Sarita, her physicist husband Karun and a young gay man.

Suri wrote: "Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands - only Karun's body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice."

His publishers said: "In accepting this award we challenge everyone to make up their own mind about Manil Suri's ... Take home to bed with you tonight and discover sex scenes that the praised as 'unfettered, quirky, beautiful, tragic and wildly experimental'."