Dua Lipa is gearing up to curate the the UK’s biggest Lit Festival
Dua Lipa has been announced as the curator of the 2026 London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, taking on one of the venue’s major programming roles for this year’s edition, running October 21 to November 1, 2026.
It’s a shift from performer to programmer, with Lipa stepping into a role that’s previously been handed to figures like Harry Styles and David Bowie.
She’ll be responsible for shaping the line-up, themes and conversations across the festival, working through her Service95 platform.
The focus, according to the Southbank Centre, is the “power of the written word”, with plans to bring together a mix of established and emerging writers across fiction and non-fiction, and try and pull in audiences who might not usually show up for a literature festival.
It’s not completely out of nowhere. Over the past few years, Lipa’s built up a steady presence in the book and interview space through Service95, launched in 2023, where she’s highlighted a pretty broad reading list with a leaning toward identity, migration and contemporary life.
Books she’s previously talked up include Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
She’s also been doing that interview space via her podcast Dua Lipa: At Your Service, chatting with writers like Douglas Stuart and Khaled Hosseini.
The Southbank Centre is framing it as a way to open the festival up a bit more and bring in new audiences, rather than keeping it strictly in traditional literary lanes.
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