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
hen 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.
The Hampshire-based writer covers everything from heartbreak and coming out to fat-shaming and catcalling in the more than 100 poems with titles such as Absent Father, An Ode to Body Hair and A Song for Dark Skin – the sort of stuff she wishes she had been able to devour as a child. Whenever inspiration struck, Gill would scribble stanzas on receipts and bits of tissue tucked away in her handbag. “It is so much pressure when you have a notebook in front of you,” explains the poet.
She pauses and adds: “People get upset when I say these things.” Which people? “I mean, I’m a woman with opinions online, so of course you get trolled. I recently changed my Twitter feed to only sharing poems, it was so corrosive to my mental health.”In addition to the odd “really nasty drive-by opinion”, however, readers have shared highly personal stories. “There was someone who told me their son had passed away and that the poems gave them a lot of solace.