Dua Lipa on her desert island reads: ‘I gift that book a lot’

She’s one of the world’s biggest pop sensations, smashes Spotify streaming records, has completed three world tours and has a glittering stash of seven Brits and three Grammys… but even Dua Lipa finds time to read.

Since she launched her book club in 2023, Lipa, 31, has become increasingly influential as an advocate for reading. On her cultural platform Service95, she shares monthly book recommendations and carries out long-form interviews with authors from Margaret Atwood to Percival Everett. And this month, she is curating London Literature Festival as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary programme, where she will interview star authors including Zadie Smith, Patti Smith and Mustafa.

Lipa is part of a wave of celebrities who are moving into the books sphere, from Reese Witherspoon to Kaia Gerber. Her curation of the festival coincides with the UK’s National Year of Reading, which aims to tackle the decline in reading and help people rediscover the joy of getting lost in a book. The initiative arrives after research by the National Literacy Trust showed that reading enjoyment among UK children hit a 20-year low in 2025, at 32.7 per cent.

“There are phones, and so many distractions, and so much going on all the time in our lives – sometimes it’s hard to just find a moment to sit down and read,” Lipa says. “You know, most of us are addicted to our phones. I just recently got an app… it blocks your social media, so that’s been really handy. I’m like, ‘All right, I have my one hour a day that I can just quickly do what I have to do online, and not doom scroll.’ And that’s given me extra hours to read.”

Her advice for reading more would be: “Limit your screen time. Throw your phone away. Do something! Something like an app that just takes you off your phone and makes a real point of putting it to the side. I think we all know how easy it is just to get locked in a doom scroll until three o’clock in the morning, and then you’re like, ‘What have I done?’”

When it comes to Lipa’s own reading routine, she dives into a book in any spare minute she can find. This is often when she’s travelling – whether on tour or on an extremely Instagrammable holiday. “I read in the car, on a plane, on the way to wherever I’m going,” she says. “Sometimes before bed, sometimes early in the morning. It really depends, but it’s everywhere and anywhere.

“I always have a book in my bag, and then whenever I have a moment… I’m trying to get off my phone as much as possible, so it’s like – phone away and just read.”

The books that have stayed with her the most – and ones she would bring with her if whisked away to a desert island – are an eclectic mix. The first is Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s classic novel about mass surveillance and unchecked government power. “I gift that book a lot, and it just surprises me every time,” she says, adding that its dystopian themes pull her in. “The fascination of that will keep it going for me, on a desert island, if I had to read it over and over again.”

She also chooses coming-of-age novel My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which tells the story of an intense friendship between two women growing up in poverty in post-war Naples. “I love that book,” she says. “I love the story and where it takes me, into Naples. And on a desert island, you need a book that takes you out of where you are.”

Her third choice is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, the short story writer’s Booker Prize-winning debut novel about a night in 1862 when a grieving Abraham Lincoln visits the crypt of his son Willie, and features 166 ghost characters. “Because with 150 characters in a book, I just simply can’t get bored.”

Alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four, the books Lipa gives as a gift most often are the Kazuo Ishiguro novels Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go. “I love him as an author,” she says. “I love the characters, the world that he creates. There also seems to be a dystopian energy to his stories, and I clearly have an affinity for those stories!

“I’ve discovered a lot about myself recently and the types of books that I like, and where I find comfort, but what I’ve been reassured about is that the books I pick are because of the relationships in them, and not necessarily because they’re harrowing or dystopian. It’s actually about the relationships and what makes it so special. It’s about what you can endure and how love survives that.”

As for what’s currently on Lipa’s nightstand? “Right now I’m reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams,” she says, adding that the Facebook whistleblower’s memoir “rocks you a little bit, for sure”. “She’s brave,” says Lipa.

Next on her list: Switzy by Emma Cline, a moving portrait of a man’s last days; futuristic novel Ply by Hernan Diaz; and state-of-the-nation story Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam.

But when her nose isn’t in a book, it would seem that Lipa might just be making more music. Asked if anything she’s been reading recently has inspired her creatively, she says: “I’m a bit too scared to talk about it right now, because I’d be giving too much away… but when I’m closer to releasing music, hit me up, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

The London Literature Festival runs at the Southbank Centre from Tuesday 20 October to Sunday 1 November