I was on holiday last week, so was unable to bring you the news that as well as truckloads of gold medals, August has also seen Team GB bring home the gong for the worst sentence of the year. Hurrah. Hats off to Cathy Bryant, from Manchester, who has just won the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, named in honour of Sir Edward's 1830 novel Paul Clifford and its fabulously contorted opening. The Bad Sex award is funny. The Diagram prize can be extremely amusing. But the most joyfully ridiculous of the literary prizes must, surely, be the Bulwer-Lytton.

Here's Bryant's winner, if you don't believe me:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

Foul yet brilliant. I'm also something of a fan of the best children's literature entry:

He swaggered into the room (in which he was now the 'smartest guy') with a certain Wikipedic insouciance, and without skipping a beat made a beeline towards Dorothy, busting right through her knot of admirers, and she threw her arms around him and gave him a passionate though slightly tickly kiss, moaning softly, 'Oooohh, Scarecrow!'

And I can't help but fall for the fantasy winner:

The brazen walls of the ancient city of Khoresand, situated where the mighty desert of Sind meets the endless Hyrkanean steppe, are guarded by day by the four valiant knights Sir Malin the Mighty, Sir Welkin the Wake, Sir Darien the Doughty, and Sir Yrien the Yare, all clad in armor of beaten gold, and at night the walls are guarded by Sir Arden the Ardent, Sir Fier the Fearless, Sir Cyril the Courageous, and Sir Damien the Dauntless, all clad in armor of burnished argent, but nothing much ever happens.

The awful thing is that I can actually see that appearing in a fantasy novel...

But back to our winner. It was her first time entering the Bulwer-Lytton, Bryant tells me, but – a long-time fan of the contest – she was inspired to do so this year by a trip to the optician. "The eyelash mites came from a terrifying optician who wouldn't stop enthusing about the awful things," she said. "I asked her if I had them and she said no, clearly very disappointed with me. I was clamped into one of those lens-testing machines so I couldn't flee. But now I can't gaze romantically into anyone's eyes without checking them first for inflammation, which tends to spoil the moment (fifty shades of red?) a bit."

As an author, Bryant feels she's probably "better at funny than meaningful". She's "currently working on a spoof diet book – only because I discovered that all the others were actually being taken seriously by people, to my surprise."

I'm looking forward to it. And as for any future Bulwer-Lytton entrants, a little tip from this year's winner. "We're surrounded by bad writing everywhere, so the bar is very, very low – to write for the Bulwer-Lytton one has to reach deep, deep inside oneself and find the utter dregs therein," says Bryant. If anyone's compelled to share their own writerly dregs with us here – the greasiest sebum of your imagination! – then please feel free.