Culture

Sara Keating on culture: Is bad publicity better than none when it comes to posthumous work?

The publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August raises many questions about respecting the wishes of artists around their work

The late novelist Gabriel García Márquez, centre, and his sons, Gonzalo García Barcha (left) and film and television director Rodrigo García Barcha, who authorised the release of Until August against their father’s wishes. Picture: Getty Images

“I would really have liked for my books to have been published after my death,” Colombian literary superstar Gabriel García Márquez said in an interview in The Paris Review in 1981, “so I wouldn’t have to go through all this business of fame and being a great writer”.

This statement was made before Márquez was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. He had been publishing journalism, short fiction and novellas since the late 1940s, but it was his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude which had brought him international fame and recognition.