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Keats’s first book of poetry was published when he was 21; Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein. But both of their youthful achievements are dwarfed by the newest star in the UK’s poetry firmament: four-year-old Nadim Shamma-Sourgen, who has just landed a book deal.
Nadim’s poems range from Coming Home (“Take our gloves off / Take our shoes off / Put them where they’re supposed to go. / You take off your brave feeling / Because there’s nothing / to be scared of in the house”), to Love (“Everyone has love / Even baddies”).
In Baddies, the young poet explores the inner life of villains a little further: “Baddies love their baddie friends / Even very baddie ones // Policemen might arrest them / But they’ll still have their love”.
Nadim was discovered by this year’s Orwell prize winner, the poet and teacher Kate Clanchy, who met his mother, Yasmine Shamma, a lecturer in literature at the University of Reading through a shared interest in teaching refugees to write poetry. Clanchy began sharing some of his poems on social media, and Nadim went on to be interviewed by the Sunday Times and Sky News, during which Kay Burley exhorted him not to pick his nose on live television.
Now he has landed a book deal with Walker Books, which will release his “astonishing” collection next summer. Walker executive Denise Johnstone-Burt said that she had been “astonished that anyone so young could write such sensitive verse”.
“The poems talk about such important feelings, like love and loneliness, and Nadim finds the perfect words,” she added. “They are simple, inspirational and have a wisdom all of their own”.
Clanchy said that the nickname she had given Nadim, the “Four Year Old Poet”, made him sound “scarily precocious”; in fact, as his mother explained on Sky News, he is still learning to read and write and he dictates his poems to her.
“I wasn’t tweeting the poems because they were so much like adult work – it was because they were so purely childlike,” said Clanchy. “Nadim has the very rare ability to articulate in images what it is to be a four-year-old, to love your mum and bugs, to wonder about baddies, baths and love, and to ‘hang up your brave’ when you come in from nursery. The individual poems moved thousands on Twitter, but they work even better as a group because they create a whole world full of glitter and hugs. This will be such a special book to share with a child.”
The deal will make Nadim one of the youngest-ever writers to land a book deal. According to Guinness World Records, the youngest commercially published female author is Dorothy Straight, who wrote How the World Began in 1962, aged four. It was published in 1964, when she was six. The Guinness record for the youngest published male author is held by Sri Lankan Thanuwana Serasinghe, who was four years and 356 days old when he released his book Junk Food on 5 January 2017, after writing it in three days.
Nadim himself sounded excited, although not excessively so, about the book deal. “I like writing poems especially about nature. I feel happy that my poems will be in a book,” he said. “When my poems are in a book, can I please have a copy?”
Walker confirmed that he would, indeed, be given a copy.
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