Liv Little cannot get sick. Not this week. A pot of raw ginger and hot water boils on the hob, while echinacea drops and herbal tea sachets decorate her dining table. “Don’t come too close!” the writer warns me as a greeting. “I think I’m getting ill and I just can’t let that happen right now.” We’re talking in the last few days before her tender debut novel, Rosewater, hits the shelves. Her calendar is chock-full of promotional commitments; every five minutes, her iPhone pings with new messages. And, yet, while we’re together, Little ignores each notification and gamely focuses on the conversation at hand. The former gal-dem CEO has, she tells me, waited her whole career for this moment. A common cold won’t be the thing to stop her now.
We’re in her home for the week: a stylish studio suite in a central London hotel. Little, 29, moved to the Kent coast during the pandemic, but is enjoying the brief return to her home city. Hot on the heels of shooting her first short film, the details of which she’s sworn not to share, Little is now fully and blissfully divorced from her past career path as a media mogul. In 2015, she founded gal-dem, an online magazine that put the perspectives of women (and people of marginalised genders) of colour at the forefront.
