Who Is Dua Lipa’s Banned-Books Library Actually For?
· The Atlantic
The pop star Dua Lipa is known for her dance-floor hits, for her turn as a mermaid in Barbie, for always seeming to be on vacation. Lately, though, she’s cultivated a reputation as a literary tastemaker. Through her book club, Service95, founded in 2023, the singer has made her love of books key to her public persona. She interviews authors on her podcast and has appeared at various Booker Prize festivities; she and her new husband, Callum Turner, purportedly bonded over a Hernan Diaz novel.
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Her latest venture, however, promotes not a particular writer or event, but the freedom to read. The Manifesto Library, which lives in the basement of the bookshop Livraria Lello, in Porto, Portugal, contains 100 titles “that challenge power, censorship, exclusion, and dominant narratives,” per a press release—banned books, in other words. Glowing media coverage met the library’s launch last month; her social conscience and sharp taste were praised.
For those who oppose book bans, those qualities are easily conflated. The freedom to read is a feel-good cause, and maybe an issue typically associated with concerned parents and school boards could use a little glamour. But Lipa’s project highlights how the public discourse around bans has become detached from the ground reality of access to books: who has it, who controls it, and the stakes of the fight.
Ironically, getting into the Manifesto Library isn’t so easy. The famously beautiful bookshop in which it’s housed is so mobbed that all visitors must buy a timed-entry ticket. (This doubles as a voucher toward a book purchase; the cheapest ticket is a little more than 15 euros.) The space itself looks inviting; it’s an auditorium with a wood-paneled conversation pit that “feels like you’re getting a hug,” Clare Yeo, a content creator invited to tour the library before it opened, told me. The book critic Ron Charles, whom I previously worked with at The Washington Post, joked that it was “a young person’s reading room”: Besides the conversation pit, there are no actual chairs, he noted when I called to ask about his visit.
The shelves display the library’s permanent collection, which is co-curated by Service95 and bookshop staff and hails from around the globe. Still, the selection is largely pointed at the history and politics of the United States. “Censorship in America was also a big concern for us,” Francisca Pedro Pinto, Livraria Lello’s head of brand and business development, told me; this is partly because “the U.S. wants to flag themselves as the world of freedom” and partly because Americans were the shop’s top visitors last year. Thus, the library includes mainstays of the U.S. banned-book canon, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. There’s also a massive best seller (Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko), a cult classic that got adapted into an Oscar-winning movie (Percival Everett’s Erasure), and a middling historical novel (Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time)—none of which has been banned.
Maybe the project seems oddly contradictory: a temple to the freedom to read, open exclusively to paying customers and stocked with literature that is widely available. But perhaps that’s only natural, given that today’s book-ban wars have become harder to define. What used to be scattershot censoriousness has become highly organized and more sweeping as attempts to censor literature have ballooned in the past few years: From 2001 to 2020, the American Library Association reckons, about 273 titles were targeted for banning each year; in 2025 alone, more than 4,000 titles were challenged. Activist groups now circulate long, detailed lists of texts they deem objectionable. New laws in Florida, Iowa, and other states have thrown accelerant on their efforts, broadening the definition of so-called sensitive or inappropriate material; several other states have created new mechanisms to prohibit a title from all of their school districts simultaneously.
As a result, in its most recent tally, from the 2024–25 school year, PEN America recorded 6,870 instances of new restrictions. These cases range in severity: The organization considers a book “banned” if a school relocates the title to a different section of the library, starts requiring parental permission for access, pulls it for review, or removes it for any length of time. Some of the books eventually return to the shelves, though there have been relatively few attempts to track how many. Still, whatever the final fate of a particular book, these bans can have serious consequences—for authors, especially lesser-known ones, whose work gets cut off from the educational market, or for educators who leave the profession after facing harassment for teaching a controversial book. Most of all, the repercussions are felt by students, who receive a very clear message about which stories their community considers dirty or deviant.
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At the same time, most readers live in an era of unprecedented access to books. The number of titles keeps growing—publishers released more than 640,000 books in 2025, a 6.6 percent increase from the previous year—and book prices have lagged behind inflation. Barnes & Noble is back from the dead; so is the indie bookstore, buoyed by a post-pandemic craving for in-person events and non-algorithmic recommendations. E-books, streaming audiobooks, and digital-lending programs have eliminated the obstacle of physical distance. In the age of next-day shipping, a teen who wants to get ahold of a banned book has never had more avenues for doing so.
These two realities—of emboldened puritanism and abundant openness—clash in confounding ways. Often, it seems like the censors and the anti-censors, each limited in their ability to reshape the opposing reality, are engaging in fundamentally expressive acts. The contemporary media environment makes out-and-out suppression of a book difficult. Utah demanded that schools dispose of every Sarah J. Maas novel in their possession but couldn’t dent the popularity of her dark fairy-tale romances; the same year the state enacted its ban, Americans bought 9 million copies of her books. This kind of censorship is local, and because high-profile literary advocates such as Lipa lack political clout in the relevant jurisdictions, they spend their energy largely on raising awareness. They join publicity campaigns and sign open letters. Or they create a separate space, far away from where censorship conflicts are actually taking place.
Displaying a book in Porto doesn’t help readers in Provo, but it does make for effective brand building. Even for authors—particularly those too popular to be substantially hurt by the bans—it can be a reputational boost. “I am now the most banned author in the United States,” Stephen King humblebragged last year. “May I suggest you pick up one of them and see what all the pissing & moaning is about?” But things can get messy when your stand against censorship alienates your fan base: In 2024, RuPaul co-founded a “revolutionary, all-inclusive” online bookstore that drew backlash for also carrying right-wing titles. In a final plot twist, the store eventually created a system for customers to flag for removal publications that were “contrary” to its “core values.”
Public shows of cosmopolitanism can only go so far, as Livraria Lello itself demonstrates. Not long ago, the shop was overrun by crowds but in dire financial straits. “They were coming in, and they were taking pictures, but we weren’t selling books,” Pedro Pinto said. So in 2015, the shop adopted its voucher system; later, to compel more customers to redeem their vouchers for a book, it raised entry prices.
The shop’s mission to “transform” visitors into readers, as Petro Pinto puts it, makes the true purpose of the Manifesto Library much clearer. Many tourists treat books as a selfie backdrop or a vacation souvenir—but there, in the basement, they may be moved to actually crack a book open. Pop stars and civilians alike are invested in being perceived as good literary citizens. The challenge is to direct that investment in a way that actually promotes the free flow of books.