Dua Lipa Is Taking Her Book Club to the Next Level. She Is Opening a Permanent Library of Banned Books
Every book on the shelves of Dua Lipa’s new library has been banned, challenged, restricted, or, in some cases, cost its author their life. The Manifesto Library opens June 27 inside Livraria Lello, the 120-year-old bookshop in Porto, Portugal, and it’s the first physical home for her Service95 book club, which she started in 2021.
100 books are stocked across four themes: power, control, voice, and memory. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is on the shelves. So is Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon, along with selected works from Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk.
“Here you will find one hundred books that ask questions, or have been questioned,” Lipa said in a press release. “Some have been banned by school districts for themes of race or sexuality. Others, written for LGBTQIA+ readers, have been restricted from display. In some cases, the author has paid for their words with their life.”
She called the library “a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed to read.”
This isn’t a celebrity vanity project bolted onto a publicity tour. Lipa’s been running one of the most serious literary operations in pop culture for years. She was a keynote speaker at the 10th anniversary of the International Booker Prize this year. She’s discussed Shuggie Bain with a prison book club. She interviews writers like Olga Tokarczuk through Service95, and she’s quietly become, in some corners, one of the best literary interviewers around.
It runs through her personal life too. She and her husband, actor Callum Turner, met at a bar while both reading Hernan Diaz’s Trust. On their honeymoon last week, Turner was photographed on the rocks at Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, the 2024 National Book Award finalist. The couple read on vacation the way other people scroll.
Martyr! has shown up in the banned-books conversation more than once this year. MSNBC’s Velshi Banned Book Club featured it in April 2026, and it’s turned up on Banned Books Week displays. The novel hasn’t actually been pulled from shelves anywhere meaningful. It gets included thematically because of what it sits with: grief, addiction, queer identity through an Iranian-American protagonist, family trauma, and martyrdom itself. Actual U.S. bans overwhelmingly hit K-12 school libraries and target explicit sexual content or specific LGBTQ+ YA titles, not sophisticated adult literary novels. Which is, in a way, the whole point of what Lipa’s library is doing: asking who decides what counts as dangerous, and why.
Francisca Pedro Pinto, head of brand at Livraria Lello, said in a statement that the shop has spent 120 years built on “a simple conviction: the book is a technology of freedom. The Manifesto Library grows from that belief.”
The novelist Min Jin Lee, who Lipa invited to her Madison Square Garden show last year, once described her like this: “You look at her and she’s so beautiful. But then you talk to her and she just becomes like any grad student.”
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