Dua Lipa Opened a Library Just for the Books People Tried to Erase
Dua Lipa has never treated her book club like a side project, and now it has a physical address. On June 27, the singer opened The Manifesto Library inside Livraria Lello, the storied Porto bookshop often ranked among the most beautiful in the world. It's not a pop-up. It's permanent.
The library is the first physical iteration of Service95 Book Club, which Lipa has run since 2021, recommending a title a month and interviewing its author for her podcast. This time, the curation has a sharper edge: nearly 100 books organized around four themes- power, control, voice, and memory- all of them titles that have been challenged, restricted, or outright banned somewhere in the world.
The shelves include Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Reginald Dwayne Betts' Felon, and selections from Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk, alongside long-time classroom targets like 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Catcher in the Rye.
In a statement, Lipa said the ambition behind the Book Club had always been to build "a home for writers and readers, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances," adding that reading brings the world closer — "but sadly, not everyone is in favour of that." She described the collection as one hundred books that "ask questions, or have been questioned," some pulled from school shelves over race or sexuality, others restricted for LGBTQIA+ readers, a few written by authors who paid for their words with their lives.
The timing matters. The library opened as part of Livraria Lello's 120th anniversary and the debut of BABELL, City of Books, a new international book festival, and it lands against a backdrop of accelerating censorship: PEN America has logged close to 23,000 book bans in U.S. public schools since 2021 alone.
Livraria Lello's Head of Brand, Francisca Pedro Pinto, connected the project to the shop's own history: after 120 years built on the idea that a book is "a technology of freedom," she said the new library grows directly from that belief, because what's at stake isn't just reading, but a society's ability to imagine and shape its own future.
The space, housed in Lello's newly built cultural auditorium designed by Álvaro Siza, is intended to function as a living venue for readings, debate, and public reflection, not a static exhibit. For Lipa, who married actor Callum Turner just days before the opening, it's one more marker in a year already stacked with milestones. This one, though, she built to last.
