Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Literary Review

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Editor
  
Nancy Sladek

Circulation
  
44,750

Country
  
United Kingdom

Frequency
  
11 per year

Year founded
  
1979

Based in
  
London

Literary Review is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 by Anne Smith, then head of the Department of English at Edinburgh University. Its offices are currently on Lexington Street in Soho, London, and it has a circulation of 44,750. The magazine was edited for fourteen years by veteran journalist Auberon Waugh. The current editor is Nancy Sladek.

The magazine reviews a wide range of published books, including fiction, history, politics, biography and travel. Contributors to the magazine have included Diana Athill, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, John Banville, Julian Barnes, Maile Chapman, Hilary Mantel, John Mortimer, Malcolm Bradbury, AS Byatt, Paul Johnson, David Starkey, John N. Gray, Robert Harris, Nick Hornby, Richard Ingrams, Joseph O'Neill, Lynn Barber, Derek Mahon, Oleg Gordievsky, John Sutherland and DJ Taylor. Literary Review also prints new fiction. Recently published authors include William Trevor, Claire Keegan and Nicola Barker.

Bad Sex in Fiction Award

Literary Review is well known for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Each year since 1993, Literary Review has presented the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award to the author who produces the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. The award itself is in the form of a "semi-abstract trophy representing sex in the 1950s", which depicts a naked woman draped over an open book. The award was originally established by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, then the magazine's editor.

The award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".

A compendium of all the award winners, along with extracts of each winning story, has been compiled by creative magazine, Nothing in the Rulebook, and is available online. The Guardian has also been keeping track of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award since 1999.

The 2016 shortlisted entries for the award were published in November 2016. The shortlist featured six authors: Janet Ellis, Tom Connolly, Ethan Canin, Robert Seethaler, Gayle Forman, and Erri De Luca. The nominated extracts for which the authors were nominated have also been published online.

References

Literary Review Wikipedia