From pop star to literary tastemaker: The rise of Dua Lipa’s book club

This week, Dua Lipa got married in Sicily at a celebration that included a party staged inside a vintage bookstore, a nod to how she and actor Callum Turner first met — over the same novel. Which, yes, is extremely romantic, but also lands differently when you know what she has been quietly building for the past few years.

Service95, her multimedia platform, launched a book club that most people initially wrote off. The site has affiliate links and travel content and the general infrastructure of a celebrity lifestyle brand. It looked, at first, like another famous person using literature as an aesthetic prop — the literary equivalent of a tote bag from a bookshop you have never actually been inside.

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Then people started watching the interviews.

Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winner, sitting across from her: "You're putting me to shame here and I love it." George Saunders, visibly delighted. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, actually engaged. These are writers who have done enough press to know when someone has not read their book. None of them are faking their enthusiasm.

The performative reading question

We are living through peak discourse about what it means to read sincerely. The "performative male" reading All About Love on the subway. The Bookstagram aesthetic that is more about the linen backdrop than the text. The celebrity book club pick announced with a quote that could apply to literally any novel. Reading has become, like everything else, something to be interrogated for authenticity.

Which is what makes the Service95 interviews so strange to watch. Dua Lipa does not just finish the books — she reads them the way you read something that has genuinely gotten under your skin. In her conversation with Diaz, she flags a scene he estimates at six lines long, then connects it to Ida Tarbell, the investigative journalist who broke up Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire in 1911, asking whether the novel's character was a deliberate echo. Diaz is caught completely off guard. That is not a question you can prepare without actually caring.

Compare this to what authors usually face. Late night hosts ask about the pen. Morning shows gave Claire Keegan, one of the sharpest prose stylists working right now, 46 seconds of speaking time in a seven-and-a-half-minute segment about her own work. The question that closes most of these interviews — what do you want readers to take away — treats a novel like a wellness campaign with a message. It is not a literary question. It is a way of filling time.

Podcasts are better but uneven. Bookshop events depend entirely on the chemistry of whoever got booked. What the Service95 interviews offer is consistency — the same quality of attention across Diaz, Saunders, Adichie, Tomasz Jedrowski, and now Kae Tempest, whose new novel Having Spent Life Seeking is the June pick. Tempest is a poet, playwright, and spoken word performer whose work resists easy categorisation. Picking that book is not a neutral act.

There is an obvious conversation to have here about why anyone was surprised. Dua has spoken about reading commentary that questioned her credibility as an interviewer based on what she looks like — the implicit argument being that being visibly attractive somehow forecloses intellectual seriousness. It is a boring premise and the interviews make it look even more so.

The bookstore wedding detail will probably get written off as set dressing. So did the interviews, for a while. At some point, the evidence just becomes the evidence.