For Dua Lipa, books have never seemed like a celebrity side project. Through Service95, reading has become part of her wider cultural world: a way of travelling, listening, interviewing, recommending, and building community around the voices that shape how people understand themselves.
Now that project is becoming physical. With the opening of the Manifesto Library in Porto, Portugal, Dua Lipa is turning the Service95 Book Club into a living space for banned, censored, and contested books. Created in collaboration with the historic Livraria Lello, the library opened on June 27, 2026, as part of the bookshop’s 120th anniversary celebrations. Unlike a temporary pop-up, it is set to remain at the venue as a permanent feature.
The library gathers 100 titles that have challenged power, censorship, exclusion, and dominant narratives. Across thousands of copies, the selection is organised around themes including power, control, voice, and memory, creating a reading room that feels less like a neutral archive and more like a political gesture.
That framing matters. Banned books are often treated as historical curiosities, as if censorship belonged to another century. But the current climate tells a different story. Across schools, libraries, and institutions, books dealing with race, gender, sexuality, identity, freedom, and political resistance continue to be challenged, removed, or restricted. Against that backdrop, the Manifesto Library turns reading into something active: a form of refusal, preservation, and collective attention.
The project also expands what Service95 has been building since the launch of its book club in 2023: author interviews, monthly reads, discussion guides, recommendations, and a wider attempt to make literature feel social rather than solitary. Service95 describes the Book Club as a space for Dua’s monthly reads, author Q&As, new releases, and ways to “read the world differently.”
What makes the Manifesto Library interesting is that it does not separate pop culture from literary culture. It understands that a global star can bring readers toward difficult books, and that difficult books can still carry mass emotional force. The point is not to make censorship look glamorous. It is to make the act of reading feel urgent again.
There is something quietly powerful about placing these books inside Livraria Lello, one of Portugal’s most famous bookshops. A space already built around literary myth now becomes a home for works that have been questioned, feared, or pushed aside. In that sense, the library is not just celebrating books. It is protecting the right to be changed by them.
Photo: Dua Lipa