10 Most Bizarre Awards

Stinky Shoe Award: Worst Odor in a Pair of Sneakers

The "Sneaker Contest" began in 1975 as a way to help a local sporting goods store sell shoes, and grew into a national event in 1988, when Odor-Eaters assumed sponsorship of the event. Now it has fermented into the ultimate test of just how offensive sneakers belonging to children between the ages of 5 and 15 can get. Sneakers were judged on the conditions of the sole, tongue, heel, toe, laces or Velcro, eyelets/grommets, overall condition and, most important, odor, by a panel. Fifteen-year-old Ben Russell, from Alaska, and his decrepit and odorous size 7 Nike's won the 33rd annual National Odor-Eaters Rotten Sneaker Contest, March 19 2008 in Montpelier, Vt. He beat out seven other contestants, from Michigan, Utah, Georgia, California, New Jersey, Vermont and New Mexico to bring home the grand prize of $2,500.

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Bad Sex in Fiction Award: Worst Sex Scene in a Book

Each year since 1993, Literary Review presents 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 editor of the Literary Review.

Jonathan Littell has won the seventeenth annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for The Kindly Ones (Chatto & Windus). The prize (a plaster foot) was presented by award-winning actor Charles Dance. It was accepted on Littell's behalf by his editor at Chatto & Windus, Alison Samuel. The judges - who called the book "in part, a work of a genius" - highlighted a passage likening orgasm to the scraping out of a hard-boiled egg by a spoon and another one in which Aue likens a vagina to "a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks". (Link 1 | Link 2)