An eight-year-old girl has eclipsed poet laureates by securing a record advance, believed to be nearly Pounds 66,000, for a book of her poems.
Sahara Sunday Spain, the daughter of a globe-trotting photographer and a former Black Panther, will see her book, If There Would Be No Light, published next May.
It will come with an introduction by Gloria Steinem, the American feminist, who told the publisher HarperCollins that despite Spain's youth she was "worth every penny" of the advance.
Steinem is one of a group of literary women who have propelled Spain, from California, into the spotlight.
Poetry is not usually so lucrative. A British poet who is talented and well connected enough to be published is lucky if his or her book sells 2,000 copies. The Birthday Letters, the last collection of Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate, was a critical and commercial phenomenon that capped a distinguished 40-year career - yet he received an advance of less than Pounds 50,000 before publication.
The economics of verse are no better across the Atlantic. Robert Pinski, the United States poet laureate, still has to teach to make ends meet and a friend confirmed last week that the advance on his last book, The Figured Wheel, was far less than $ 100,000.
In her first media interview last week, Spain displayed the poise and style of a Hollywood starlet in her twenties.
"I don't know where it comes from, but it feels like I swallow the words down from the sky and they come up again as poems, already complete and entire," she said.
What are her influences? "I suppose I would say William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. I enjoy their vocabulary. And my friends. And my mother, of course," she said.
An only child, she has a colourful family background. Her mother, Elisabeth Sunday, has lectured on photography and taken pictures round the world; their travels in the Far East and Europe have provided much of the background for the poems.
Her father is Johnny Spain, a black militant who has spent time in jail and now teaches law at San Francisco University. He has not seen his daughter for five years.
A seasoned public performer, Spain has read her poetry at San Francisco festivals and walked on stage in New York last month to introduce Steinem to an audience of 700 as her "honorary grandma".
Alison Fox Mazzola, a teacher at the school for gifted children that Spain attends in San Francisco, says she has been writing exceptional poetry since she was a toddler. "Last year her poems made another teacher cry," she said. "They can be very moving.
"She does not read them to her fellow second-graders, because they do not understand them, but she gave a reading to fifth-graders (11-year-olds) and they loved it. She is an exceptionally talented yet very well balanced little girl."
Liz Pearle, her editor at HarperCollins, said: "I was frightened that she would turn out to be a monster, but she is a real kid, full of mischief.
"Sahara is far from perfect. For instance, she cannot spell all the words she knows. When she thinks of something, she runs to her phone and dictates it to the answering machine. She is frightened that if she does not get the words down immediately they will disappear."
The publishing world is still digesting the deal, signed last week. One scholarly publisher said: "This is not real poetry. She obviously has a talent, but no experience yet. It will be marketed alongside The Little Book of Calm and Chicken Soup for the Soul. That means, of course, that she will sell a bundle."
Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, wrote his first poem at 16. He was not impressed by Spain's work, which he compared to greeting card verses: "It's a bit Hallmark."
Paul Muldoon, professor of poetry at Oxford University, said: "I just hope that the publishers make their money back on this young poet, to whom I wish all the best - $ 100,000 is a big gamble. Poetry is rarely a bestseller, the average advance is more like Pounds 2,000."
Motion has launched a project to record every "English-language poet of substance" reading their own work.
"It is ridiculous that we don't have recordings of Thomas Hardy or DHLawrence or AEHousman or all sorts of people that could have been recorded but weren't," he said.
The Poetry Archive's master tapes will be kept in the British Library and will be available to download over the internet. Cassettes will also be sold. Motion hopes to have recorded 500 poets by the end of next year and wants the archive to expand as a "project for posterity".
