Natasha Onwuemezi

“I think love is a really transformational thing. For me, I’ve found being in relationships with other women, especially Black women, has been kind of like holding up a mirror to all of the different parts of yourself.” So says Liv Little about the driving force behind her delicate, evocative début Rosewater, which follows 28-year-old poet Elsie as she struggles to find her feet in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.

Speaking on a surprisingly resilient WhatsApp call that only disconnects once, Little is currently in a reflective, contemplative headspace in the Jamaican mountains, where she has come to spread her dad’s ashes. From the first page to the last—and including the moving acknowledgements and disarmingly atmospheric cover—the novel’s heady themes of love, home and grief are powerfully portrayed.

“I’ve grown up with a mum that was always like, ‘It’s better to love and to lose, or to be hurt, but not to be afraid of all of those things.’ My step-dad passed maybe five years ago, and even in my mum’s grief, that was something that she really echoed,” Little says. “And I think with losing my dad as well. I’m like, ‘Yeah, you know what? Love is important. Love is a force.’ And it’s something that I feel really fortunate to have in my life. So, I wanted to explore love and all of its complexities [in this book].”

I wanted to write and I wanted to just be creative and explore life in the world

Rosewater starts with an unsettling scene: Elsie waking up after a night out with her casual hook-up Bea to the sound of bailiffs at her door, ready to evict her. “With the opening, I really wanted for you to sit in the discomfort and the fear and the sheer panic that is travelling through Elsie’s body and through her mind,” says Little. “She’s struggling to breathe in this moment, when her home is being taken away from her and she’s trying to process all of the different things that going on: Bea in the bed, the bailiff at the door, the reality of what’s gonna happen next, the fear, the lack of security, the not knowing where she’s gonna go—even as I’m saying it, how could someone breathe in that moment?”
From this scene we follow Elsie as she tries to moor herself and find some stability—mainly in the form of acquiring a job and secure housing—as well as attempting to reconnect with her estranged best friend, Juliet. Carving out a career as a creative and being allowed the time and space to develop a craft is a difficult task, but it’s made even more difficult for Elsie as a homeless queer woman of colour in a big city that is experiencing rapid and aggressive gentrification. Poetry is an important aspect of the book, with Elsie’s poems written by Little’s friend, performance poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal. “I tried to write the poems myself,” Little laughs. “They weren’t bad but I knew in my heart that Kai and their style, their tone of voice—it felt exactly how I imagined [Elsie] would recite and write poetry.”

Little describes collaborating with Jamal over voice notes. “We ended up with, you know, four really gorgeous poems that I felt really captured who Elsie was, and how she sees the world. And actually—like when I received the first draft of the poem ‘Pepperpot’—it made me cry, because it captured what it means so intensely and so beautifully. You’re uncovering something about the dish, and the layers and the richness and the meaning. And I think there’s a line about turning scraps or discarded bits of meat into something really rich and delicious. Kai is an incredibly talented poet, and it just worked. Like really, really well.”

Growing from gal-dem

For the past few years, Little has been busy running the game-changing media company gal-dem, which she founded when she was 21. She stepped back in 2020 to undertake a Masters in Black British Writing at Goldsmiths, but had to put this on hold to care for her sick father. But writing fiction is something she has always wanted to do. “It was something I needed, if I’m being completely honest. I had spent a lot of years running a business and not focusing on my own storytelling, so I was definitely bursting to express myself in another way. I wanted to write and I wanted to just be creative and explore life in the world. I think it was like, ‘Well, if you want to do it, you’ve got to do it, right?’ So you have to be disciplined.”

I feel like the work that I’ve been doing all these years kind of just all came together and I’ve ended up being in this really, really safe dynamic. You know, just in wonderful hands

Little’s agent is Abigail Bergstrom of Bergstrom Studios, who she signed with six years ago, meaning their working relationship has been a patient one. “I obviously haven’t written books in those six years,” says Little, who adds that while she was approached to write a The Good Immigrant-esque non-fiction anthology series and contribute to other projects, they didn’t connect with what Little actually wanted to write. “The way that I do things is to think, ‘OK, will I love this in five years’ time? Will I stand by this? Is this something that excites me creatively and that I really want to work on?’ And Abi just was like, you know, ‘I’m here; [a fiction book] is a much longer game’. So yeah, six years later, she was still there. She stuck with me.”