Unfinished novels by the author Terry Pratchett have been ceremonially destroyed by a steamroller, in accordance with his last wishes.

A hard drive containing drafts of as many as 10 books was crushed last week at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.

Before he died in 2015, Pratchett asked that everything he had been working on be destroyed by steamroller, an act in keeping with the wry humour of his Discworld series.

In an interview shortly after Pratchett’s death, fellow author and close friend Neil Gaiman told The Times newspaper about the plan.

He said Pratchett wanted "whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all."

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Gaiman said at the time that he was "ridiculously glad that that hadn't happened" - but more than two years later the deed was finally done.

Rob Wilkins, Pratchett's assistant, used the author's Twitter account to show photographs of the hard drives being crushed on Friday morning at the showground in Tarrant Hinton, Dorset.

The news was not widely circulated until the Guardian reported on the crushing on Wednesday morning, a prelude to an exhibition about Pratchett at the steam festival.

Pratchett died aged 66, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He continued to write with the help of friends, and became a prominent Alzheimer's campaigner.

Two of his novels were published posthumously, but the rest of his work was left untouched until its recent destruction.

In a Twitter Q&A in 2015 Pratchett's daughter Rhianna dismissed any suggestion of an "unfinished works" compilation as "unlikely."

It is not entirely clear how many unfinished works there were on Pratchett's hard drive, but a report of a memorial event on Pratchett's official website made reference to "the 10 unfinished novels sitting in Pratchett's archives."