In Porto, Dua Lipa has opened the Manifesto Library, a permanent home for 100 banned and challenged books, inside Livraria Lello, winner of the 1000 Libraries Award for most beautiful bookstore in the world.
On the evening of 27 June 2026, in a neo-Gothic bookshop in Porto, one of the most famous women in the world stood in front of a wall of books that various governments, school boards and censors have tried very hard to make disappear. There were no pyrotechnics and no setlist. Dua Lipa was there to open a library: the Manifesto Library, the first permanent, physical home of her Service95 Book Club, installed inside Livraria Lello, the shop generations of travelers have called the most beautiful in the world.
It’s an unlikely headline if you haven’t been paying attention, to Dua Lipa or to the bookshop. Look closely at either, and the whole project starts to feel more like an inevitability.
The Pop Star Who Never Stopped Reading
Let’s start with Dua Lipa. Her public résumé needs little introduction: three Grammy Awards, billions of streams, stadium tours across six continents, one of the defining pop catalogues of her generation. But running quietly underneath the hits has always been another Dua, softer and more bookish, the one who has been pressing reading lists on friends since childhood and reads on tour in the gaps most artists fill with their phones. Books even wrote her love story: she and her husband, actor Callum Turner, discovered on meeting that they were both midway through the same novel, Hernan Diaz’s Trust. A coincidence any reader recognizes instantly as a plot point.
In 2022 she gave that other side a name, launching Service95 as her newsletter and “cultural concierge,” and its book club grew into something genuinely serious: a monthly read paired with long, generous conversations with Margaret Atwood, Olga Tokarczuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Claire Keegan. A wave of musician-led book clubs has followed, with young artists like Laufey running celebrated clubs of their own, but Service95 remains the standard-bearer, and this autumn Lipa is even curating the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival. The Manifesto Library, which she calls “a dream partnership,” is the point where the digital community steps into a room and becomes a place you can stand in.
A Bookshop That Was Already a Manifesto
If a book club born from handwritten recommendation lists was ever going to take physical form, there was only one address for it. Livraria Lello opened on Rua das Carmelitas in 1906, dreamed up by the brothers José and António Lello and designed by the engineer Francisco Xavier Esteves in neo-Gothic style laced with Art Nouveau.
Light pours through a stained-glass skylight bearing the motto Decus in Labore, dignity in work, and pools on the famous crimson staircase, which forks mid-air like a sentence changing its mind. The staircase looks carved from ancient wood; it is in fact reinforced concrete, an early and audacious use of the material in Portugal, and the illusion has held for well over a century. In 2025, 1000 Libraries gave the long-standing verdict a formal recognition, presenting Lello with its Award for the most beautiful bookstore in the world.
What makes Lello the right home for dangerous books, though, is less the architecture than the attitude. This is a bookshop with a record of bold moves: the campaigns that rallied readers around it through the pandemic, a ticketed-entry model that redeems against a book and quietly converts a million and a half visitors a year into book buyers, and a sustained feat of creative direction that has done as much as any institution to make books cool again in Portugal.
For its 120th anniversary in 2026, Lello unveiled a roughly 1,000-square-metre expansion by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, adding four new spaces and earning recognition as a National Monument. Its head of brand, Francisca Pedro Pinto, has compressed 120 years of the mission into a single line: “the book is a technology of freedom.”
A Shrine to the Books That Vanished
Inside Siza’s new auditorium, the Manifesto Library holds 100 titles, and nearly every one has, somewhere in the world, been questioned, challenged, restricted or banned outright.
The shelves are arranged around four themes. Power asks who gets to define the stories we inherit, gathering Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Control maps the forces that constrain free thought, from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to Kafka’s The Trial and Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Voice lifts up the overlooked, with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Memory guards testimony against forgetting, holding Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. Many of the hundred have been flagged in school districts for themes of race or sexuality, or written for LGBTQIA+ readers and quietly pulled from display. Some, as Lipa has noted, were written by authors who paid for their words with their lives.
Crucially, this is not a mausoleum. Lello describes the space not as an archive of censorship but as a living cultural room for reading, debate and public reflection. Visitors are warmly invited to help shape what belongs on the shelves, and Lipa’s framing, reported widely, is disarmingly simple: “Reading the world brings us closer.” She calls the library a shrine to disappeared books and to readers who refuse to be told what they may read, then hands the decision back to you. Sometimes, she suggests, the most subversive act is to read a book and then talk about it with someone.
Why This Matters if You Love the Slow Things
In an age of the infinite scroll, the Manifesto Library makes a case for the analog and the unhurried: a physical shelf, a printed page, a conversation held face to face over a glass of Douro red. Porto was made for this pace, all sunlit cobbled lanes, tiled façades and a river that turns to gold in the late afternoon.
It’ is a city that invites you to slow down and pay attention, and rewards you generously when you do. Entry to the library comes with any Lello admission ticket, and the price is redeemable against a book, which means every visitor leaves holding one.
To open one of these books is to be handed a voice, often carried from a country, a faith or a life gloriously unlike your own, and to be trusted to listen. To read it in a room built for wonder, among strangers doing the very same thing, is a small and joyful act of world citizenship. The Manifesto Library welcomes every kind of reader, whatever you make of the titles on its shelves.
It simply opens its doors, hands you a story, and trusts you to meet it with an open heart. To read, and then to talk, and to keep on wondering, is one of the kindest things we can do for one another. And if that makes you an old soul, take heart: you are in the warmest and most magnificent company.
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Millie Ramm
Millie has been writing since she was a child, and has spent more time with her nose in books than anywhere else. She has been ghostwriting novels and editing for the past few years, and when not working she is curled up with her cats, looking for her next read.
