Dua Lipa traces her love for books back to childhood

Singer Dua Lipa revealed that her love for reading began in childhood, inspired by her parents and a local bookshop in London. She highlighted how books shape understanding, sharing her profound experience visiting a women’s prison book club in the U.K.

Los Angeles: Singer-songwriter Dua Lipa, who is known for hits like ‘Dance the Night Away’ and ‘Levitating’, but when her childhood was all about books.

The 29-year-old musician opened up about how her love of reading started at an early age, reports ‘People’ magazine.

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She told ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ magazine, “It was such a big part of my childhood. There was a big bookshop. It was at the O2 Centre on Finchley Road in London, and there was a kids’ section”.

As per ‘People’, Dua Lipa said her mother, Anesa, would spend her weekends sitting in the children’s section, “reading her books, and I would just spend all day in there reading my books. I think books allow us to slow down a little bit”.

Her paternal grandfather was a well-known historian in Kosovo and her parents also instilled a love of reading in the singer from an early age.

The Grammy winner visited a book club in a women’s prison in the U.K. as a part of the Booker Prize Foundation’s Books Unlocked program and shared that the experience had a profound impact on her.

“There was also one lady in there that I think about often, and she was about 52 years old or something, and she said, ‘Oh, had I maybe read books sooner in my life, maybe I wouldn’t be here, because reading books has really made me understand people and humans and emotions’. Reading opens you up to the world. And it makes the world so much smaller”, Dua Lipa explained.

The prison book club happened to be reading Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, the same book that was the first selection for Lipa’s Service95 Book Club.

Back in 2023, she shared in a YouTube video about her prison visit, “I started a book club with Service95 just to get more people reading”.