Dua Lipa Opened A Library And Every Book In It Has Been Banned Or Censored.

Dua Lipa opened the Manifesto Library on June 27th inside Livraria Lello, one of the most celebrated independent bookshops in the world, located in Porto, Portugal, and the collection of 100 books it holds shares one thing in common: every one of them has been banned, challenged, censored, or restricted somewhere in the world. The library is the first permanent physical home of Lipa's Service95 Book Club, which she founded in 2022 and which has since become one of the most prominent celebrity-led reading communities in the world, featuring author interviews with writers including Margaret Atwood, Olga Tokarczuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Salman Rushdie. The 100 books are organized around four themes, Power, Control, Voice, and Memory, and include works banned by school districts for their treatment of race or sexuality, titles restricted from display because they were written for LGBTQ readers, and books whose authors, as Lipa noted in her statement, have in some cases paid for their words with their lives.

The auditorium housing the Manifesto Library was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza and sits within a bookshop that has been operating for 120 years, having long served as a gathering point for writers, radicals, and readers and as a rumored inspiration for the library in the Harry Potter series. Lipa described the project as a dream partnership and called the library a shrine to books that have disappeared and to readers who refuse to be told what they are allowed to read. She added that sometimes the most subversive thing a person can do is read a book and then talk about it. The opening coincided with BABELL, a new international literary festival in Porto, where Rushdie and Tokarczuk both participated in events alongside the launch. The library is designed not as a static archive but as a living cultural space with ongoing programming, debate, and community events, and Lipa has also been announced as the curator of the Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival running in October and November of this year, making the Manifesto Library the most recent expression of what has become a sustained and increasingly influential commitment to literary culture from one of the biggest pop stars in the world.

Source:https://consequence.net/2026/06/dua-lipa-manifesto-library/