Dr Georgi Gill
IASH Public Engagement Fellow October 2025 – March 2026
Home institution: University of Edinburgh
Georgi Gill is a poet, editor and researcher working at the intersection between poetry, creative research methodologies and medical humanities. In January 2025, she gained her PhD in Health in Social Science from the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh for a thesis considering the exploratory and communicative possibilities of poetry workshops with people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS). Georgi was diagnosed with MS in 2003. She has particular interests in the experience of located researchers and the unique perspective and possibilities of inhabiting that role, and also in the ethics of participatory creative research.
Georgi was the Editor-in-Chief of The Interpreter’s House literary magazine from 2018 – 2025. She has been widely published in literary anthologies and journals. Her poetry collection Limbo (Blue Diode, 2021) was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for Best Manuscript in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Scottish National Book Awards, ‘Best First Book’ in 2022. Georgi was the inaugural poet in residence at the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum, and ‘Scur’, a poem written during the residency, was awarded second prize in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2020. She is currently preparing a monograph derived from her doctoral project.
Project title: Poems on my Mind: poetry writing groups for people living with neurological illness
This project will build upon the findings generated by Georgi’s PhD research, which developed the novel approach of creating data with PwMS in poetry workshops. The research found that group poetry writing offered opportunities for social engagement and community building; creative occupation; and validation both of participants’ health experiences and their creative efforts. Participants reported that writing and discussing poetry were safe, boundaried ways of engaging with the emotionally difficult subjects of illness and disability. Poems on my Mind will build legacy for this research through a programme of public engagement activities, training and resources which will expand the reach of the approach to new audiences, and evaluate the uptake and effects of collaborative poetry workshops.
Georgi will develop and share poetry training resources with the MS Society and Leuchie The National Respite Charity, who both support people with progressive neurological illnesses. As part of this process, she will train staff and volunteers from these organisations in poetry workshop delivery. She will also edit and disseminate poeMS: an anthology, a collection of poems by her doctoral research participants to neurologists, neurological support charities and via the Scottish poetry community. Through these different strands, Poems on my Mind will empower stakeholders to enhance wellbeing through poetry and enrich understandings of patient experience.
You can reach Georgi at georgigill@yahoo.co.uk