Dua Lipa is in her book-girl era. This weekend she appeared at the literary world’s version of Glastonbury – Hay Festival – not once, but twice. The middle of a lush green field, surrounded by sheep, rolling hills and hundreds of esteemed authors might not be the usual setting for a global pop star who has six Brit Awards and three Grammy’s to her name.
But it turns out Dua Lipa likes to push herself out of her comfort zone as much as possible: ‘I thrive in throwing myself in the deep end…In life you never really know what an experience can give you,’ she told an entranced Hay crowd. ‘No matter what I’m doing, I’m always doing a lot of things for the first time, and I think that’s quite special.’
Well, Hay was certainly a first and it marked another beginning - the launch of Dua’s Service95 book club, which will sit beside her podcast ‘At Your Service’ as part of her wider content platform and ‘cultural concierge’. ‘Starting the book club was a bit of a no brainer for me,’ she explained. ‘I absolutely love reading, I love the idea of sharing how books make people feel…books are really important to me and if I can share that in some way, then I feel like I’m on the right track.’ Dua went on to explain how conversations with authors have been some of her favourite on the podcast so far because writers are such natural storytellers.
As well as being interviewed about her own ‘life in books’, Dua also took to the Hay Festival stage to interview Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart for her podcast about his debut Shuggie Bain, which is her book club’s first pick. Much to the crowd’s delight, she tested out her Glaswegian accent: ‘The Glaswegian dialect that goes through the whole book is really amazing. I feel like while I was reading it, I kept finding myself speaking in a Glaswegian accent in my head and if I was reading it alone in my room then I would quietly say it out loud.’
But the music star’s love of books is deep rooted and goes back to her childhood, growing up first in London and then moving to Kosovo when she was 11. From Roald Dahl’s The Twits which taught her, ‘Beauty comes from the inside out and it’s what you do and how you move in the world that really matters’, to Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series which kickstarted her love of reading and was her ‘first step into understanding racism and classism at a time when I was figuring out the world.’
Then, once Dua started putting music out in the world and touring with her first album as a teenager, the allure of novels took on a new meaning as she discovered they could help her disconnect. ‘I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t going to look at my screen if I was on a place etc, and so I would pick up a book…if I wasn’t sleeping I was reading.’ It was also during this first tour that she discovered how book themes can hit home differently when you’re at certain points in your life.
One of the books she remembers most vividly from this time is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, which is about love and infidelity. Dua told the crowd how the book had had a profound effect on her while she was going through a difficult early relationship of her own. ‘I was with someone who had a different idea on fidelity to me and the book had themes that helped me understand different people’s emotions and thinking from a different perspective…Tomas the character, he has an unapologetic philosophy in the book on his idea of relationships and monogamy and that was really interesting to me to think about. Things that were happening in my life, what I was writing about in my music, it was quite circular.’
And even though this particular book gave her a deeper understanding of people's mindsets, she says her own opinions on fidelity remain steadfastly the same: ‘My philosophy on it hasn’t changed, but it was very interesting seeing it from a different understanding, or just relationships as a whole. I think that I have a firm understanding on the way that I seem them.’
The singer also admitted she is drawn to ‘emotionally traumatic reads’ and ‘intense human experiences,’ such as Shuggie Bain and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but , as a self-confessed romantic, she always tries to see ‘the through line of love that goes within it…when you can see both sides it makes the darkness easier to digest rather than just focussing on the really difficult moments.’ She doesn’t always opt for the heavy reads though: ‘I think after reading something [dark] it’s nice to read something a little bit light-hearted afterwards. I wouldn’t recommend going into another heavy lift. It’s almost like you watch a scary movie and then you watch a comedy after.’
There’s no doubt we’ll be seeing a lot more of Dua’s book-girl era - and we're here for it. As for what else is on the horizon creatively, she says she’s not thinking about writing her own book quite yet – her focus is on finishing her next album which she’s currently work on. Douglas Stuart did say he’d like to cast her the TV adaptation of Shuggie Bain. All she’d need to do is brush up on that Glaswegian accent. If anything, it definitely fits into what she calls her ‘why-not energy’: ‘If there’s something that you like why not try, see if you enjoy it. You’ll never know unless you just dive in and try something.’
Dua Lipa: The Books That Shaped Me
The Siege By Ismail Kadare
Jonathan Cape On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: Ocean Vuong
Dua Lipa: The Books That Shaped Me
The Siege By Ismail Kadare
Jonathan Cape On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: Ocean Vuong
