Dua Lipa has opened her very own permanent physical library for banned and challenged literature to encourage people to pick up more books and further advance the freedom to read.
Nestled within the shelves of the iconic Livraria Lello bookstore in the Portuguese city of Porto, The Manifesto Library features 100 contemporary titles from across the world.
Many of these have stirred debate, been censored, or even removed from schools and libraries over themes of race, gender, identity, and politics says Service95, Lipa’s lifestyle brand that functions both as a book club and an editorial platform with weekly newsletters and podcasts.
“The collection is more than an archive of banned books, although many on its shelves have been prohibited from publication, stripped from school curricula or removed from library systems in an attempt to stop someone, somewhere from reading them,” Service95 said in a statement.
The Manifesto Library officially opened to the public on June 27, as part of the inaugural BABELL literary and cultural festival, which celebrated Porto as a “city of books” and Livraria’s 120th anniversary.
Lipa called the library a “dream partnership” between Service95 and Livraria, and a “shrine to books that have disappeared”.
The British-Albanian pop star added: “You are invited to visit and decide for yourself what belongs on these shelves. Because sometimes the most subversive thing you can do is read a book and then talk about it.”
Four themes
Readers can browse the library’s books by four themes: Power, Control, Voice, and Memory.
Power highlights titles that challenge power structures, social systems, or cultural norms, while Control delves into works focusing on censorship, propaganda, technological influence, and ideological conditioning, according to Livraria.
Voice serves as a platform for the silenced and marginalized, while Memory brings together books about war, dictatorship, exile, or collective trauma.
Among notable titles are George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, and Mohammed Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ (Power); as well as Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’, and Yoko Ogawa’s ‘The Memory Police’ (Control).
Also included are ‘My Pen is the Wing of a Bird’ by 18 Afghan women writers, Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’, and Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verse’ (Voice), as well as Min Jin Lee’s ‘Pachinko’, and Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, and Alexei Navalny’s ‘Patriot’ (Memory).
For those who can’t visit the library in person, a full list of The Manifesto Library’s books can be found on Goodreads.
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Rampant book censorship
The launch of The Manifesto Library comes at a time when book censorship is still rampant in today’s society.
In the United States alone, a total of 6,870 book bans were recorded in 2024–25, albeit lower than the 2023–24 academic year, according to a report from the nonprofit organization PEN America.
The most-banned book during the reviewed period was Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which follows a youth gang leader who undergoes an experimental aversion therapy to rid himself of violent tendencies.
Tied in second place were Jennifer Niven’s ‘Breathless’ and Patricia McCormick’s ‘Sold’, followed by Malinda Lo’s ‘Last Night at the Telegraph Club’ and Sarah J. Maas’ ‘A Court of Mist and Fury’.
“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide,” PEN America wrote.
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