She's Got New Rules: Dua Lipa Opens Library for Banned and Censored Books

British-Albanian pop star Dua Lipa has inaugurated the Manifesto Library, a permanent space dedicated to banned and censored literature.

Opened during the inaugural edition of the BABELL international book festival, the library occupies the cultural auditorium of Porto’s historic Livraria Lello bookshop and is home to around 100 titles are arranged across four themes: power, control, voice and memory. Each of the works has been removed from school curricula, suppressed by governments, or has been written by an author who faced personal or legal consequences for their work.

Lipa launched Service95 in 2021, which began as a newsletter before growing into a lifestyle and culture platform, with the addition of a digital book club in 2023. She said in a statement: “This library is 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… Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it.”

The library’s collection includes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian fiction that has been among the most challenged books in American schools, and work by Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding following a fatwa issued in response to 1988’s The Satanic Verses.

Other authors present in the collection include Olga Tokarczuk, whose Nobel Prize-winning work has attracted controversy in her native Poland; and Reginald Dwayne Betts, the poet and lawyer who wrote Felon, a memoir of incarceration.

Book-banning in American public schools has reached record levels in recent years, with the American Library Association documenting the highest number of challenged titles in more than three decades in 2023, and the second highest in 2025.  Of the unique titles challenged last year, 40 percent represented the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of colour. 

Lipa is one of the world’s best-selling musicians—her 2020 album Future Nostalgia won the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. She has spent recent years building a parallel cultural identity through Service95, which now includes the singer’s podcast series, featuring names such as Atwood and poet, performer and artist Kae Tempest.