Norman Mailer, the titan of American literature and self-appointed voice of 1960s manhood, has won the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his description of the act that led to the conception of Adolph Hitler.

In one of his final works, The Castle in the Forest, Mailer writes from the point of view of a demon describing the encounter between Klara, Hitler's mother, and Alois, a man believed to be her uncle.

Norman Mailer, shown in 1984, has won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award post-humously.
The Associated Press

This incestuous coupling had Klara clinging to  Alois "with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One," Mailer wrote.

Mailer, considered a giant of American literature for works such as The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night, would have enjoyed the ribbing, the judges said.

"We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humour, " they said.

Mailer died of renal failure last month at age 84.

A panel of editors from London's Literary Review holds the contest annually to name the year's most atrociously written sex scene.

Mailer was nominated among an illustrious company of internationally known writers, including Ian McEwan for On Chesil Beach, Ali Smith for Girl Meets Boy, Clare Clark for The Nature of Monsters and Richard Milward for Apples.

David Thewlis, who appears in the Harry Potter movies as teacher Remus Lupin, was selected for a sex scene in his novel The Late Hector Kipling, about an S&M lover who "endures a poultice of hot dripping wax and cold lager before the core of his soul spasms and snaps, spilling out its filthy pips.''

Christopher Rush's Will, a fictional account of Shakespeare's life, features the bard describing his wife Anne Hathaway's "heaving haunches."

Jeannette Winterson was picked for her awkward love scene in The Stone Gods, involving a woman and a robot.

Earlier winners of the prize, offered for the last 15 years, include Tom Wolfe and Sebastian Faulks, both of whom declined to turn up to collect it.

With files from the Associated Press