Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- John Updike’s sex scenes -- including a romp with a “Widows of Eastwick” witch in a beachside motel room -- won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever- anxiously awaited Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.

Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, captured the 16th annual Bad Sex Award itself for a scene in “Shire Hell” that begins with moans and nibbles and works up to screaming and other animal noises.

Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year’s worst sex scene. London’s monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”

The judges cited Updike for his “unique achievement” after his latest novel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” garnered a fourth consecutive nomination for the prize.

“Good Sex or Bad Sex, he has kept us entertained for many years,” the judges said in a statement, quoting from a passage so redolent in lips, rubbing and “deep throbs” that we blush to reproduce it here.

Johnson accepted her prize, the traditional plaster foot, in a ceremony at the In & Out Club in St. James’s Square in London. Her winning passage begins on fake fur.

“I try to rise up to kiss him -- it’s so lively, the kissing -- but he pushes me down, again,” she writes. “He likes to kiss me all over before he does anything else.” Then comes the similes of a fluttering moth and a cat lapping cream.

Expressly Erotic

Pornographic or expressly erotic works are excluded from the contest. Yet the judging panel, which consists of Literary Review staff, always finds plenty to choose from.

The 10 finalists for 2008 included steamy scenes from Paulo Coelho’s “Brida” and Simon Montefiore’s “Sashenka.” James Buchan made the shortlist with “The Gate of Air,” in which a man has sex with a pretty ghost. (“A darkness engulfed him.”)

Alastair Campbell, spokesman for Tony Blair when he was U.K. prime minister, made the final round with a gauche encounter on “an oddly shaped park bench” in his debut novel, “All in the Mind.” There’s yanking and clutching and a moment when “he stuffed Rosalie’s knickers into his pocket.”

“I would really like to win it, even though I know I don’t deserve it,” Campbell wrote in the Guardian over the weekend. “Then again, could this be what practitioners of the dark arts will recognize as back-wrist reverse spin?”

To contact the writer on the story: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 25, 2008 14:01 EST