Dua Lipa Reveals Which Book Most Influenced Her as an Artist

Dua Lipa is looking back on how books have impacted her craft.

The singer, 30, opened up on the topic during a live recording of her Service95 Book Club video podcast at the New York Public Library on Sept. 15. Lipa was in conversation with author David Szalay, whose novel Flesh is the book club’s October selection.

When asked by Spotify’s Chief Public Affairs Officer Dustee Jenkins about a book that most influenced her craft as a songwriter, Lipa credited Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids.

“Just Kids is such an incredible book and such a time capsule of creativity when it was really emerging, especially during that time in the 60s, 70s,” she said.

The acclaimed 2010 book, which recounts Smith’s friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, was also Lipa’s September 2023 book club pick.

The singer also credited Lemony Snicket’s popular children’s book series A Series of Unfortunate Events, along with authors Malorie Blackman and Jacqueline Wilson, as being some of her early favorites.

“On weekends, my mum would either take me to the bookshop or to the park,” Lipa said of her childhood reading habits. “Those are the two things that we did, most weekends. There’s this one place close to where we lived on this road called Finchley Road [in] London. Now, it’s a Waterstones, but it used to just be a shop called Books. There was a big kids section and my mum would take something to read and I would spend the whole day reading everything that was in there, and that would be my weekend.”

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“I just loved books from that point on,” Lipa continued. “I just felt like I connected with different stories. It served as an escape … that was just something that I fell in love with.”

Lipa launched her monthly book club in 2023 through her Service95 editorial platform. Each month, the singer chooses books that “represent diverse global voices, telling powerful stories spanning fiction, memoir and manifesto,” per the club’s website. Flesh, also a finalist for the Booker Prize, documents a young man’s coming of age.

“I think it quite accurately portrays the way that people change, and the way they stay the same,” Szalay said of the novel. “I think that Ishtwan is both the same person, recognizably the same person at the end, as he was in the beginning, and totally different in other ways.”

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Lipa also noted how sharing books like Szalay’s through her podcast, and building a young readership, is especially important to her.

“We don’t have enough younger readers and we need to have more of them,” Lipa said. “And so if I can play a small role in doing that, that makes me really happy.”

Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club podcast is now available to stream on Spotify.