Mega Agency
By
January Nelson
Every book on the shelves of Dua Lipa’s new library has been banned, challenged, restricted, or, in some cases, cost its author his life. The Manifesto Library opens on June 27 inside Livraria Lello, a 120-year-old bookstore in Porto, Portugal, and is the first home of his Service95 book group, which he launched in 2021.
100 books are stored across four themes: power, control, voice, and memory. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is on the shelves. So does Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts, and selected works from Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk.
“Here you will find a hundred books that ask questions, or have been asked,” Lipa said in a press release. “Some have been banned by school districts because of racial or gender themes. Others, written for LGBTQIA+ students, have been banned from being shown. In some cases, the author has paid for their words with their lives.”
He called the library a “temple of vanished books, of writers whose courage exposes structures of power and control, and of students who refuse to be told which book they are allowed to read.”
This is not a vanity project for a celebrity tied to a publicity tour. Lipa has been running some of the most critical writing in pop culture for years. He was the keynote speaker at the 10th anniversary of the International Booker Prize this year. He interviewed Shuggie Bain and the prison book club. He interviews authors such as Olga Tokarczuk for Service95, and quietly, in some corners, has become one of the world’s leading book reviewers.
It affects his personal life as well. She and her husband, actor Callum Turner, met in a bar while they were both reading Hernan Diaz’s Trust. On their honeymoon last week, Turner was photographed on the rocks of Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a 2024 National Book Award finalist. The couple learned on vacation how other people scroll.
Martyr! appeared in the discussion of banned books more than once this year. MSNBC’s Velshi Banned Book Club included it in April 2026, and it was featured in Banned Books Week displays. The novel has not actually been pulled from the shelves anywhere meaningful. It is contextualized because of what he is dealing with: grief, addiction, identity for the Iranian-American protagonist, family trauma, and martyrdom itself. The actual ban in the US has mostly reached K-12 school libraries and has targeted graphic 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: to ask who decides what is most important, and why.
Francisca Pedro Pinto, head of product at Livraria Lello, said in a statement that the store has spent 120 years built on “a simple belief: the book is the technology of freedom. The Manifesto Library grows out of that belief.”
Novelist Min Jin Lee, whom Lipa invited to his Madison Square Garden show last year, once described her as follows: “You look at her and she’s very beautiful.”
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