Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth has earned a nomination for the Bad Sex in Fiction award for a scene in The Humbling involving the seduction of a lesbian by an aging stage actor.

Roth, one of America's most esteemed writers, is in good company among this year's nominees, which include Booker Prize winner John Banville, Israeli novelist Amos Oz and punk rocker turned writer Nick Cave.

Britain's Literary Review magazine hosts the competition annually, which highlights "crude, tasteless [and] perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description."

The prize, to be awarded Nov. 30 in London, is a plaster foot.

'He takes a floating step forward...She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in a simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound.'—John Banville, The Infinities

Sanjida O'Connell is the only woman to make the shortlist, selected for The Naked Name of Love, about a young Jesuit priest who is taught how to love by a gifted shaman woman on the eastern steppes of Mongolia.

It contained the lines: "He slid his hands around her waist. Her skin was smooth and she felt sleekly muscled, like a dolphin might..."

The other nominees:

• Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand.
• Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Munro.
• Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones.
• Amos Oz for Rhyming Life and Death.
• John Banville for The Infinities.
• Anthony Quinn for The Rescue Man.
• Simon Van Booy for Love Begins in Winter.
• Richard Milward for Ten Storey Love Song.

Roth's nominated scene involves a threesome in which a lesbian woman uses a green dildo on another woman, while a man looks on.

'Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four, and as she touched she made me weightless, lifting me off the table in a prolonged ritual of levitation.'—Paul Theroux, A Dead Hand

"There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be," Roth writes.

Cave was picked for his second novel The Death of Bunny Munro, about a sex-obsessed door-to-door salesman.

In one seduction scene, Cave writes: "Bunny lies on his back on the sofa. He is naked and his clothes sit in sad, little heaps on the living room floor."

The late Norman Mailer won the award in 2007 for a scene from his fictional Hitler memoir The Castle in the Forest and Rachel Johnson won in 2008 for Shire Hell.