“Getting people hooked on books is my vibe,” says Dua Lipa, talking about the rush she felt from turning her producer on to Flesh by David Szalay and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
“He said, ‘I inhaled them and now I’m on a reading streak.’ That gave me this sense of gratification.”
Well, the pop superstar-turned-book pusher is going to be getting the mother of all freudenfreude hits this coming week as she curates this year’s London Literature Festival. It’s another headline-grabbing coup for the Southbank Centre following Harry Styles’s Meltdown in the summer, but is far from just an attempt to jazz up the promotional posters.
Dua Lipa is curating the London Literature Festival
Lipa has become a genuine force on the literary scene with her book club and accompanying podcast, underpinned by a newsletter and media site called Service95. And the best thing is, it all comes from her own personal need to curate the world.
“I’ve always been my friends’ concierge,” she says, speaking from New York. “Whenever they go somewhere, they ask for recommendations for restaurants or vintage shops, and I always come up with an extensive list. I pride myself on people loving the restaurant I told them about. There’s something about it that I get my kicks from… when I was 15 I had a blog with recommendations about what I was enjoying and Service95 has just become a more sophisticated version of that.”
But what has given it particular purpose is the focus on books, as much a life-defining passion point as music. This is not a move your average megastar makes. There is not mad dollar in speaking to Olga Tokarczuk about her philosophical eco-noir novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This whole parallel career of hers seems to be just something fun that’s suddenly become serious. She says, “It’s just an extension of who I am.” She’s just really into books.
“What I really wanted for the festival was a mix of icons and emerging voices,” she says of her vision for the festival. “I feel so lucky to have legends like Patti Smith, but then we also have debut authors like Sufiyaan Salam who’s written this book called Wimmy Road Boyz. I love discovering these new voices.”
“I feel so lucky to get the opportunity to dive into these books that I love and the conversations I have with authors ends up so profound. It always expands my worldview”
Lipa will personally be interviewing Smith and another Smith, Zadie, on stage, along with the Canadian-Sudanese poet and musician Mustafa. While singing in front of tens of thousands in stadiums around the world is totally fine for her, talking to authors on stage is bringing “butterflies… excitement, the adrenaline rush. I’ve done a handful of interviews in front of an audience, so I’m ready for it, but you never know what’s going to happen in front of an audience.”
And yet, this isn’t quite stepping out of her comfort zone so much as stepping into another comfort zone where people scream slightly less. She knows her books. She is a compulsive reader, making the most of the travelling time in her globe-trotting — “I rarely log into wi-fi when I’m on the move… I can even read in cars, a little flex of mine” — and her podcasts with the likes of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro are frequently revelatory.
“George Saunders was another author who was amazing to speak to. I’m a fan of the world he creates with his stories. I feel so lucky to get the opportunity to dive into these books that I love and the conversations I have with authors ends up so profound. It always expands my worldview.”
This, in turn, is something that has expanded the worldview of her audiences, and there is real sense of mission behind Service95, which is clearly the result of Lipa’s natural drive but also recognition that there is important work to be done here. “The site is five years old now, and we offer different perspectives from around the world. For me, it was really important to think: who gets to tell these stories? Not everything is from a Western viewpoint.”
Artwork by Rama Duwaji featuring Dua Lipa celebrates the opening of the London Literature Festival at Piccadilly Lights
Getty
Lipa was born in London in 1995, just as Britpop crested. Her mother, Anesa, and her father, Dukagjin, are Kosovo Albanians who had fled to London as refugees during the Balkans conflicts. Lipa and her two younger siblings were brought up in West Hampstead in a music-loving environment; her father was in a successful rock band called Oda back home.
When Kosovo declared independence in 2008, the family left London to live in Pristina, but a couple of years later, in a typically determined move, Lipa returned on her own to live in Camden with another family member. She wanted to start a music career. At the time, Camden was in the sweaty grip of what is now known as the “indie sleaze” scene (Amy Winehouse and all the post-Strokes copyists), and while absorbing this, Lipa began releasing YouTube videos of herself singing before going viral was even a thing. Record company heads swivelled clean off when her songwriting skills became as apparent as her star quality. Over the following years she rose to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world.
Although, among the attention and awards, the fashion partnerships, the fame and fortune, she retained a smart and engaged edge that separated her from her peers. She was not just outspoken but informed on issues affecting vulnerable communities around the world — LGBTQ+ people in Brunei, civilians in Palestine — and established the Sunny Hill Foundation to support young people in Kosovo. This clearly was someone who knew knowledge was not just power, but liberation.
She cites Albanian author Ismail Kadare as a writer who changed her life. She read him during the time when her family moved back to Kosovo, and says, “His work helped me connect with the community there and understand the history of Albania. In Kosovo, we speak the same language but have very different histories, so that was a crash course in that, and also things like communism.”
The idea that literacy can help you not just understand the world but connect you to it has been important to Lipa and while she says she didn’t start with any big earnest mission, “encouraging young people to read has become a real goal for me”. But this is not easy, and given the Mephistophelian digital world captivating everyone’s attention, she is pushing a pragmatic message. Read whatever you like, the act itself can be transportive. It’s not Proust or nothing.
Dua Lipa was brought up in West Hampstead with her two siblings and parents
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“With phone addiction such a real thing, I think it’s so important to get people interested in experiences away from that,” she says.
“Obviously with my book club interviews I’m going into a deep dive as to why an author did certain things, but you don’t have to be super-analytical about what you read. The whole point is just the act of connection, and I think books do that in such a beautiful way. They help us develop ourselves emotionally, and understand one another. Some books can make the hairs on your arm stand up, others make you feel love or euphoria — as long as it makes you feel something.”
The festival duly has a high and low mix, or rather, it ignores such distinctions altogether. Another very zeitgeisty aspect is the cultural melting pot it embodies, where multiple voices speaking from different personal experiences are permitted, and where not just genres, but mediums overlap. One event within the programming is called Fierce Sounds, and will feature Kae Tempest and Omar Musa discussing the intersections of music and literature. While digital culture is full of dangers, this destruction of old delineations has undeniably made things more interesting.
Lipa says she has been inspired in her own lyric writing by speaking to all these authors and drilling down into “their ability to convey a feeling that hits home for people”. She drily joshes that “authors have the luxury of 300 pages while I have to do it in three minutes”, but she’s clearly fascinated by the direct nervous system-jolting that the best writing can achieve in any medium, and it’s allowed her to understand why her own millions-selling, billions-streaming songs have connected with so many.
“When I was 15 I had a blog with recommendations about what I was enjoying and Service95 has just become a more sophisticated version of that”
“I just interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro for the podcast, who is one of my favourite authors,” she says. “We were talking about books and music and he was saying, ‘If you ask someone, they’ll probably say that you write love songs, but I think you write relationship songs.’ We talked about how the things we both gravitate towards are the relationships within stories. And as I was speaking to him, I was having this revelation. People think the books that I recommend tend to be quite sad but I think I have a fascination with enduring relationships. Whether they’re familial or love relationships, or friendships, I’m interested in how they endure through these hard moments. This is the thing.
“So when I’m recommending A Little Life [by Hanya Yanagihara], and people are saying, ‘My God it’s so harrowing,’ I’m like, I cried too, but the relationship and the love through it all is what keeps me coming back. Like, there’s hope.”
Lipa comes across as a true believer, still that kid who left Kosovo on her own to chase her wild dreams in Camden. She enthuses about tracing the hallowed stomping grounds of Patti Smith in New York ahead of their event.
“I passed by the Chelsea Hotel and was thinking about Patti’s imprint on the world,” she says. “I’ve always loved her, and I interviewed her before around her first book, Just Kids, and she was everything I hoped she’d be. Just Kids is a vibrant love story from that world of the Chelsea Hotel, and with [2025’s memoir] Bread of Angels you truly have a deep dive into her soul, her family, her marriage. She is so open and generous with her readers. I feel so lucky that I get to sit and chat with her at the festival, and I think everybody in the room is going to leave with something special.”
Dua Lipa married Callum Turner earlier this year
PA Wire
With such deeply felt attachments to literary souls, it’s small wonder that her own relationship began with a book. She married actor Callum Turner in London in May this year (with a bigger celebration at a villa in Sicily soon after), a union which was portrayed as the latest hot glamorous power couple… but they actually bonded as a couple of book-nerds.
“It’s a beautiful story actually,” she says. “We were on a table with friends having a drink, and he asked, ‘What book are you reading?’ I was like, ‘Trust by Hernan Diaz.’ He replied, ‘That’s so weird, I’m reading the same book.’
“It was strange because I’d just been recommended the book by a producer on the music video for Training Season. The book is made up of four books essentially, and I’d finished that first book as I was flying from Tokyo and Los Angeles. Callum was like, ‘I’ve just finished the first book’, and I said, ‘But I just finished the first one.’ And he said, ‘So we’re on the same page.’
“He can do the funny little dad joke, Cal can. We had a laugh about it, and it just carried on from there. It was sweet, we ended up finishing the book together in that way. Afterwards he was promoting his TV show and I was getting ready for the release of my album, and a lot of our messages were: ‘So what part of the book are you at now?’ It’s definitely a real connector.”
So people should come to the festival because they’ll probably find the love of their lives?
“That’s the ideal. But people should just come for the act of discovery. There’s a session on male tenderness with Tomasz Jedrowski. We have authors from Indonesia and Argentina and Rwanda and Switzerland, I think everybody will find something special coming there.
“Maybe find the love of your life or maybe just enrich your life.”
Dua Lipa’s book recommendations
Martyr! Kaveh Akbar
Martyr! Kaveh Akbar
Waterstones
“The story follows Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian-American who is suicidally sad but desperate not to waste his suicide. The long shadow of his mother’s death on Iran Air flight 655 — tragically shot out of the sky by the US military during the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 — looms over his life. Cyrus is a recovering addict learning to live with his sobriety. In his quest to find meaning and come to terms with the death of his mother, he develops an obsession with martyrdom. Martyr! made me think about martyrdom in ways I’d never considered. Yes, Cyrus’s thoughts turn to those prepared to sacrifice their life for their country. But when he encounters Orkideh, a terminally ill artist living out her final days on display in the Brooklyn Museum, he begins to see sacrifice through an entirely different lens. This novel is profound, sincere, comedic and quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before.”
Lost Lambs Madeline Cash
Lost Lambs Madeline Cash
Waterstones
“Possibly the most hyped novel of 2026. It’s packed with a dysfunctional family, a bloodthirsty billionaire, conspiracy theories, online radicalisation, an infestation of gnats and, at its heart, a search for identity and meaning. The story follows the unravelling of the Flynn family. Parents Catherine and Bud decide to open up their marriage. Catherine is day-drinking while Bud is coasting through his deadbeat job at Alabaster Harbor. Their three daughters — Abigail, Louise and Harper — rebel and scream for attention in their own ways. Cash writes at full volume — reading Lost Lambs can feel like scrolling an overstimulating social feed. But she keeps sight of the tenderness at the heart of the Flynn family and hidden among the drama is a lot of truth about connection and why it matters. It’s funny, fast and intoxicating.”
Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber
“Klara is an artificial friend to 14-year-old Josie. But right from the start, it’s clear this isn’t the world we know. Children are genetically edited to give them advanced intelligence but at great cost — sometimes their lives. Josie is sick and Klara begs the sun to pour its nourishment into her with an unquestioning belief in its goodness. This novel feels prescient about AI, but at its core this is about what it means to be human and why that is irreplaceable.”
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