The Most Subversive Thing You Can Do Is Read a Book, and Dua Lipa Just Built a Library for It
Here's the full list of every banned book she chose.
Dua Lipa has had a year. She got married in a secret London wedding in June, released a live album recorded in Mexico, and gave a keynote speech at the 10th anniversary of the International Booker Prize. And on June 27, she opened a permanent library of 100 banned books inside one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, in Porto, Portugal.
And if you ask us, this is what consistently showing up looks like.
The Manifesto Library lives inside Livraria Lello in Porto and houses books that have been banned, censored, removed from school shelves, or otherwise suppressed by governments and institutions around the world. It opened as part of BABELL, a new international book festival, and it is permanent.
“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,” Lipa wrote on Instagram. “Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it.”
The Library Lives Inside the Most Famous Bookshop in the World
Livraria Lello is an iconic space that has inspired authors and readers alike. Time Out named it the oldest bookshop in Portugal, and it has been cited as one of the most beautiful bookshops on the planet. Its new cultural auditorium, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Álvaro Siza, is where the Manifesto Library permanently lives.
Francisca Pedro Pinto, head of brand at Livraria Lello, described what the library means to the space in a statement: “For 120 years, Livraria Lello has been built on a simple conviction: the book is a technology of freedom. The Manifesto Library grows from that belief. Because what is at stake is not only the future of reading, but a society’s ability to imagine, interpret, and build its own future.”
For Dua Lipa, it was “a dream partnership.”
The Four Categories That Organize This Library Are Also a Diagnosis of the Present
Power, Control, Voice, and Memory. These are the four themes that organize the Manifesto Library’s 100 titles. And the organizing logic is unmissable.
Power gathers works that directly confront dominant structures: political regimes, social systems, and cultural norms. Among them: Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Grapes of Wrath, The Second Sex, and The Crucible. Control brings together books about surveillance, propaganda, and ideological conditioning — from Animal Farm and Brave New World to Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Voice amplifies those who have historically been silenced or excluded across race, gender, identity, and geography, according to Vogue. The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gender Queer, Heartstopper, Things Fall Apart, and We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth are all here. Memory preserves what war, dictatorship, and exile have tried to erase: The Diary of a Young Girl, Persepolis, Beloved, Maus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Alexei Navalny’s Patriot.
“Here you will find one hundred books that ask questions, or have been questioned,” Lipa said in a press release. “Some have been banned by school districts for themes of race or sexuality. Others, written for LGBTQIA+ readers, have been restricted from display. In some cases, the author has paid for their words with their life.”
According to PEN America, as reported by Inc. and Time Out, 6,870 schools in the United States banned books during the 2024-2025 school year. A number of those exact titles are now permanently on the shelves in Porto.
She Has Been Building Toward This Since 2022
Dua Lipa founded her Service95 Book Club in 2022, which she recently renamed “Same Page,” according to Time Out, and has since released monthly author interviews on her podcast and published a monthly book recommendation. This year, she appeared as a keynote speaker at the 10th anniversary celebrations of the International Booker Prize. She is also curating the Southbank Center’s 2026 London Literature Festival, running from October 21 to November 1.
In other words, the literary world treats her as a peer because she earned it.
The Manifesto Library is what that work looks like at scale.
“When I founded the Service95 Book Club, my ambition was for it to become a home for writers and readers, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances,” Lipa said. “Reading the world brings us closer — but sadly, not everyone is in favor of that.”
The Full List: All 100 Books in the Manifesto Library
Power
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Free by Lea Ypi
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Jerusalem by Gonçalo M. Tavares
Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller
Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El-Akkad
Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act by Joshua Wong and Jason Y. Ng
Control
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Ai Weiwei on Censorship by Ai Weiwei
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Blindness by José Saramago
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Accusation by Bandi
The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Voice
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Another Country by James Baldwin
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Decolonizing the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Erasure by Percival Everett
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Hard Like Water by Yan Lianke
Heartstopper by Alice Oseman
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
My Friends by Hisham Matar
My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird by Afghan Women
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Olhos d’Água by Conceição Evaristo
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jędrowski
That Hair by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Three Marias: New Portuguese Letters by Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
There There by Tommy Orange
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai
We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey
Memory
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk
Looking at Women Looking at War by Victoria Amelina
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Oblivion: A Memoir by Héctor Abad Faciolince
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Patriot by Alexei Navalny
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon by Richard Zimler
The Machine to Make Spaniards by Valter Hugo Mãe
The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
The Murmuring Coast by Lídia Jorge
The Return by Dulce Maria Cardoso
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Wild Swans by Jung Chang