Her touching verses about heartbreak, fat-shaming and body hair have made her Britain’s most-followed poet on social media – and now she’s heading for TV
When Nikita Gill was growing up, she was constantly told she was oversensitive. It was a label she didn’t like, even if it did seem fairly accurate. “I used to feel things really deeply all the time,” she says. “The world is overwhelming, especially when you’re young.” Today, Gill is Britain’s most followed poet, with more than a million fans online, who feel that her fine-tuned emotions are not her weakness, but her superpower.
On Instagram, TikTok and elsewhere, Gill posts stylish snippets of her work which are savoured by readers who include Alanis Morissette, Sam Smith and Khloe Kardashian. Her success, since one of her pieces blew up on Tumblr six years ago, has seen her lumbered with another unwanted label: Instapoet. The 35-year-old has never liked the epithet, which she feels is almost invariably used for female and marginalised writers who broke through online after failing to get past traditional gatekeepers. She was even less impressed when one article casually dismissed her work as “sad girl” poetry.
“There’s no such thing as an instant poet, right?” says Gill, sitting on a sofa overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral in London, in the offices of the publisher she signed a deal with after receiving more than 100 rejection letters elsewhere. Even if the badge had ever been accurate, Gill would have long outgrown it. She has published five collections of poetry, whose fans include Marian Keyes and Costa winner Monique Roffey, as well as a novel in verse, The Girl and the Goddess, that is currently being adapted for TV by Lena Headey, AKA Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones. Her poetry features on Sister Susannah, a 2021 single by sitar star Anoushka Shankar. And this month she publishes her young adult debut, These Are the Words, “an empowering feminist collection” she has also illustrated.
