Dua Lipa launches a permanent banned-books library inside Porto's Livraria Lello

Pop musician Dua Lipa has opened the Manifesto Library, a permanent collection of banned and censored books housed in Porto’s historic Livraria Lello bookshop. The project is tied to BABELL – City of Books, a new international book festival, and grew out of Lipa’s Service95 Book Club, through which she has spent years recommending titles and interviewing authors. The collection holds roughly 100 works organized around four themes—power, control, voice, and memory—including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Felon, and pieces by Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk.

Lipa framed the library as a response to escalating restrictions on reading, noting that many of the selected books have been pulled from schools or displays over themes of race, sexuality, or LGBTQIA+ content, and that some authors paid for their words with their lives. Livraria Lello, which is celebrating 120 years, positioned the effort around the idea that a book is a “technology of freedom.”

The significance is less about any single title than about a high-profile celebrity lending visibility to censorship as a live cultural and policy issue. Lipa will extend that advocacy by curating the Southbank Centre’s 2026 London Literature Festival in late October.