1871 illustration of a Russian grave-digger by Viktor Vasnetsov [1848-1926] from the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, via WikiCommons

The publication of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King last Friday, covered by the Dailies, has prompted a diverting piece on posthumous novels in the Telegraph. The list begins with Jane Austen, some of whose most famous novels – notably Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – were published posthumously, although the Telegraph list only cites the less famous Sanditon.

Our favourite posthumous novel on the list is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The story behind this book – a classic comic novel set in New Orleans – is steeped in legend. After many fruitless endeavours to have it published, its troubled author eventually committed suicide in 1969. Several years later, his mother showed the manuscript to the novelist Walker Percy, who helped get it published in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. More recently, the three novels in the best-selling Meillennium series by Stieg Larsson were published in the three years following the author’s death in 2004. There’s talk of a fourth instalment by Larsson’s surviving partner based on his notes, pending approval from the author’s estate.

There are other classic posthumous novels that didn’t make it onto the list. The Wheeler Centre is a great fan (inasmuch as an institution can be a fan) of The Leopard – although Tony Wilson struggled with it at school. WG Sebald’s Austerlitz was published to acclaim after the author’s untimely demise, but we can’t help but feel it’s inferior to earlier novels like The Emigrants and especially The Rings of Saturn. Roberto Bolano’s 2666 was published after the Chilean author succumbed to liver disease. There’s good reason to believe the obsessively private and perfectionist Vladimir Nabokov wouldn’t have been thrilled to have his unfinished The Original of Laura in the public domain, but published it was in 2009.

Perhaps the greatest of posthumous novelists (if there can be such a thing) is Franz Kafka. Kafka, who died early because of tuberculosis, famously instructed his friend Max Brod to burn everything he wrote. Brod, less talented than Kafka but a better judge of talent, ignored his friend’s instructions and published the first of Kafka’s three great but unfinished novels in 1925, a year after his death. The Trial, The Castle and Metamorphosis went on to change the course of literary history and maybe even history itself – we’re not usually given to such grandiose statements here at the Dailies, but this is Kafka we’re talking about, after all.

Image of a storm breaking over Robinson, an outstation near Borroloola in the Northern Territory’s Gulf country, by Peter Nihill via WikiCommons.

Publisher Simon & Schuster Australia has published a translation of Ted Prior’s Grug Learns to Read in Karrawa, an indigenous language from Australia’s Top End. The book – Grug Milidimba Nunga Read Imbigunji – has been translated by Ngingina. It’s been published with assistance from the Indigenous Literacy Project. The ILP will distribute the book among remote indigenous communities like Robinson (see image) and the nearby Borroloola on the McArthur River, where Karrawa is one of several languages spoken. Borroloola, a community of about 780, of which about 200 are not indigenous, is home to the Yanyuwa people.

According to the ILP website, “[i]n the Northern Territory, only one in five children living in very remote Indigenous communities can read at the accepted minimum standard.” It’s commonly believed that at the time of European settlement there were between 350 and 750 indigenous languages spoken in what is now Australia. Today, 150 languages remain, of which all but 20 are endangered.

Karrawa is an alternate spelling of Garrwa. The National Indigenous Language Service estimated in 2004 that the language had between 40 and 200 speakers, although Crikey’s Fully Sic blogger on language matters, Piers Kelly, notes, “Calculating accurate speaker numbers is notoriously difficult.” He adds, “There is a new National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS) report being compiled this year and it’s hoped that the figures will be more reliable.”

The Grug series of 25 kids' books was originally published by Hodder Headline Australia between 1979 and 1992, and have now been republished along with seven new titles.