Dua Lipa's Banned Books Stand
Dua Lipa Opens Manifesto Library in Porto to Champion Banned Books
Anonymous
Key Points
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Manifesto Library will be located inside Livraria Lello in Porto and is integrated into a new cultural auditorium designed by Álvaro Siza for the BABELL – City of Books festival.
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The 100-book collection is organized around four themes—power, control, voice and memory—providing a structured curatorial framework for works that have faced censorship or controversy.
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The library opens on June 27 as a living cultural space intended for reading, debate, and public reflection, aligned with the Babell festival.
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Dua Lipa frames the project as inviting questions and discussion around censorship, describing it as a subversive act to read a book and then talk about it.
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The initiative is presented as a shrine to books that have disappeared and to readers who refuse to be told what they can read, with the aim of spotlighting censorship as a global issue.
Dua Lipa officially opened the Manifesto Library at Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal on June 27, inaugurating a curated collection of 100 books that have been banned, censored, or challenged worldwide. The library sits inside a new 1,000-square-meter cultural auditorium designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza, built as part of the inaugural BABELL – City of Books festival. Rolling Stone Australia reported the library is the first permanent physical home of Lipa's Service95 Book Club.
Lipa called the project "a shrine to books that have disappeared" and described the act of reading a banned book and then talking about it as "subversive," according to iHeartRadio. The opening arrives as PEN America documented 6,870 book bans in U.S. schools during the 2024–2025 school year alone — part of a total of 23,000 bans recorded since 2021.
100 Books Organized Around Power, Control, Voice, and Memory
The Manifesto Library's collection is built around four themes: power, control, voice, and memory. The Music reported that titles include Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Reginald Dwayne Betts's Felon, and works by Salman Rushdie and Min Jin Lee. Rushdie himself attended the opening ceremony alongside fellow festival guests Olga Tokarczuk and artist Ai Weiwei.
Lipa's Service95 platform began as a newsletter in February 2022 and added a monthly book club in May 2023. The Manifesto Library marks its leap from a digital recommendation service into a permanent physical space. Lipa has previously interviewed authors like Douglas Stuart and spoken at the International Booker Prize's 10th anniversary, building credibility in literary circles well before this launch.
Álvaro Siza's New Wing Turns a Bookshop Into a Cultural Monument
Livraria Lello, founded in 1906 and already one of the world's most visited bookshops with roughly one million visitors a year, expanded into a new 1,000-square-meter wing for its 120th anniversary. Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza designed the auditorium space to host reading, debate, and public reflection. Aurora Pedro Pinto, president of the Livraria Lello Foundation, described books as "a technology of freedom," according to Marketeer.
Artist Ai Weiwei also contributed to the new wing. His installation, titled "A4," references the blank sheets of paper protesters held up during Chinese anti-censorship demonstrations. The combination of Siza's architecture and Weiwei's installation gives the Manifesto Library a cultural weight that goes beyond celebrity branding, framing Porto as a global hub for intellectual freedom.
Critics Ask Whether 'Banned' Is the Right Word for Bestselling Titles
Not everyone is convinced the library's framing is accurate. Some critics note that several titles in the collection — including The Handmaid's Tale — are massive global bestsellers and are not legally banned anywhere. What they face is being "challenged" or removed from specific school curricula, which is a different category of restriction. Critics argue the project risks conflating local school board debates with outright government censorship.
Supporters counter that Lipa's reach — over 88 million Instagram followers — brings these debates to audiences who would otherwise never encounter them. Broadway World reported that the library is designed as a "living space" meant to grow over time, with the potential to inspire similar Service95-branded hubs in other cities. Whether it is seen as activism or branding, the Manifesto Library puts censorship on a much bigger stage.
Porto Braces for a 'Dua Lipa Effect' on Literary Tourism
Livraria Lello already runs on a ticketed entry system to manage its one million annual visitors. Analysts and Portuguese media expect that number to rise sharply. Marketeer noted that Porto is being positioned as a global "sanctuary" for intellectual freedom, a deliberate contrast to rising censorship trends in the United States, Hungary, and Russia.
The BABELL – City of Books festival, which runs alongside the library's opening, hosted its first edition with a lineup that included Rushdie, Tokarczuk, and Weiwei. If the festival becomes annual and the Manifesto Library remains a permanent fixture, Porto could join Edinburgh and Hay-on-Wye as cities defined by their relationship to books and reading culture.
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