There are some beautiful passages in Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, but the main sex scene isn’t one of them, according to a British literary magazine.

Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North – inspired by the story of Australian prisoners of war forced to work on the Burma Railway – has been shortlisted for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.

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The offending passage describes an encounter between the main character, Dorrigo Evans, and his uncle’s wife.

“He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world,” Flanagan writes.

“As they lost themselves in the circumnavigation of each other, there came from nearby shrill shrieks that ended in a deeper howl.

“Dorrigo looked up. A large dog stood at the top of the dune. Above blood-jagged drool, its slobbery mouth clutched a twitching fairy penguin.”

The Literary Review says the purpose of the award is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction and to discourage them.

The prize doesn’t cover pornography or erotic literature.

Literary Review senior editor Jonathan Beckman says the 2014 shortlist is one of the strongest in years.

“Flanagan swaddles the encounter in so many abstract nouns that the whole experience becomes very obscure and desexualised,” he told The Guardian newspaper.

But the Australian faces some stiff competition.

Wilbur Smith writes in Desert God that: “Her body was hairless. Her pudenda were also entirely devoid of hair.”

In Things to Make and Break, author May-Lan Tan writes: “She comes and comes, waves of hot silk – I grit my teeth and push her off. I bend her over and really give it to her.”

Then there is this, from Saskia Goldschmidt’s The Hormone Factory: “I unbuttoned my pants, pushing them down past my hips, and my beast, finally released from its cage, sprang up wildly.”

Eventually, the reader learns, “the beast found its way in”.

Others on the shortlist include previous Booker winner Ben Okri, former Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

Andrew Marr’s Head of State was considered but while the sex scene starts badly enough – “they bucked like deer and squirmed like eels. And after that, vice-versa” – the judges said it “failed to sustain its early promise”.

The winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction award will be announced on December 3.

The list:

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
The Age of Magic by Ben Okri
The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd
Desert God by Wilbur Smith
Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan
The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh
The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark