Dua Lipa was not standing on a concert stage when she made one of the sharpest observations of her career. She was addressing the International Booker Prize ceremony, and she had just finished explaining how a Bulgarian writer, a Bulgarian translator, a small British independent publisher, and an international prize had taught her something about her own Albanian heritage she had never known. For anyone who has ever felt genuinely changed by a single book, that sentence lands hard. The pop artist who sang in nine different languages across 33 cities and 20 countries in a single touring year has spent the quieter hours between shows doing something that rarely makes headlines: reading, deeply and globally, and now arguing in public that it matters more than people think.
Lipa launched her Service 95 Book Club three years ago, and in that time she has published 33 monthly reads. Eight of those have been translated fiction, drawing from Japan, Korea, Nigeria, Colombia, the US, Mexico, Hungary, Norway, Afghanistan, Poland, Ireland, Spain, the UK, France, Vietnam, and Australia. The breadth is not incidental. It mirrors the way she has lived: born in the UK with Albanian as her first language, permanently mobile, permanently between worlds.
Walking Naples in someone else’s shoes
The case she made for translated fiction was built from specific scenes, not abstract praise. She described walking the streets of Naples in the shoes of a young girl becoming aware that her future would be defined by her gender. She talked about gaining wisdom from a pigeon on a balcony in Mexico City, citing Guadalupe Nettel’s observation that ‘you can’t get anything past a pigeon.’ She described overhearing French rescue responders decide not to send help to 30 drowning asylum seekers. She called the genre ‘the antidote to othering,’ a fusion of an experience that is simultaneously universal and entirely singular.
But the moment in her speech that shifted the room came earlier, before any of that. When she launched the book club, it was not, as she put it, ‘in a cozy cafe in London.’ It was with a reading group at Downview Women’s Prison, alongside someone named Gabby, as part of the Books Unlocked program run by the Booker Prize Foundation, which supplies free Booker-nominated titles to UK prisons and young offender institutions each year. She described that morning as one of the most insightful book conversations she has ever had.
What one woman said at Downview
One of the women in the group shared something Lipa said she will not forget: that perhaps if she had read more books when she was younger, maybe she would not be there now. The observation reframed the whole premise of a book club. Reading, Lipa argued, is rarely just a solitary activity. It can trigger a conversation, or, as it did that morning at Downview, provide a way for a wider group to share a profound experience together. She added that a book club discussion might be the one occasion where you actually get more out of it if you disagree.
She closed by referencing last year’s International Booker Prize winner, ‘Hot Lamp,’ written by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasi. She quoted Mushtaq’s acceptance speech directly: ‘This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small. That in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole.’
The sworn virgins she never knew existed
A sworn virgin in Albania, a centuries-old cultural identity Lipa encountered for the first time not through family or travel but through a novel written by a Bulgarian author and published by a small British independent press.
She had thought she knew everything about Albania. The book proved otherwise, and she said so plainly, without embarrassment. That is the thing about translated fiction, she suggested: the story you assumed belonged to you often turns out to belong to a stranger, and reading it back from the outside is how you finally see it whole.
