Poet Nikita Gill: ‘I worry about people getting tattoos of my work. What if I made a typo?’ | Poetry | The Guardian

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.

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.