Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa

For her May Service95 Book Club interview, Dua Lipa is joined by one of Ireland’s most celebrated short story writers, Claire Keegan.  Together, they explore Keegan’s powerful read So Late In The Day: a sharp, unsettling portrait of a man whose lack of generosity towards his fiancée gradually reveals the often quiet yet destructive nature of modern misogyny.  Dua and Claire unpack the story’s subtle details, discussing how the author’s experiences as a woman living in Ireland helped to shape the narrative, and how – in a book that takes less than an hour to read – she captures an unsettling dynamic that resonates in relationships worldwide.  There’s also a special bonus for dog lovers: keep watching for a charming appearance from a four-legged guest…  Join the club:  📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]  📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews  📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com  And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the archives this month, we bring you Dua’s conversation with Polish-German author Tomasz Jedrowski, author of Swimming In The Dark.    Set in 1980, it’s a story of first love between Ludwig and Janus, told against the backdrop of communist Poland as the regime starts to crumble.    This queer coming of age story explores a time and place where love, class and politics do not exist in isolation. The communist party looms large in this story, impacting both professional and personal relationships.    Dua and Tomasz reflect on what might have been if their parents had not made the choices they did. Tomasz asks what life would have been like for a young gay man in Warsaw in his parents’ generation and Dua imagines growing up in Kosovo under the shadow of war.    It’s an intimate and beautiful conversation that illuminates a turbulent period of recent history that many people today know little about.   Join the club:  📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]  📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews  📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com  And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa, we’re passing the mic back to you. Dua put your questions to Jez Butterworth about her April Monthly Read, Jerusalem – and here, he answers them.  Jez traces the play’s origins back to New Year’s Eve 2000, explains how it came to find its name and goes inside his writing process: what tends to come first, which scene he found most difficult to write and the unique rituals that shape his writing.  Watch (or listen to) the full conversation to go deeper into Jerusalem, Dua Lipa’s April read for the Service95 Book Club.  Join the club:  📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]  📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews  📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com  And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the April edition of the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa sits down with playwright Jez Butterworth to discuss his modern masterpiece, Jerusalem. If you’ve never read a play before, this is the place to start.  With its raw, visceral portrait of myth, rebellion and a nation wrestling with its own identity, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest British plays of the 21st century.  In this special video, Jez Butterworth reads a powerful excerpt from the play featuring Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron dispensing life advice to his young son Marky – a rare father-son moment filled with folklore and the wild inheritance of blood and belonging. “It was, at that point in 2009, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted to write… It was a massive challenge for me,” says Jez of the passage.   Jerusalem blurs the line between truth and myth, capturing Rooster’s attempt to pass down something larger than himself; an inheritance of wildness, belonging and belief.  If you haven’t already, be sure to catch Dua and Jez’s full interview, too, available to watch now here.  Join the club:  📩 Email us your thoughts – ⁠[email protected]⁠  📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews  📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at ⁠service95.com⁠  And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For April, Dua has chosen Service95’s first play: Jerusalem by award-winning British playwright Jez Butterworth. He’s widely regarded as one of the leading voices in contemporary theatre – with this conversation with Dua showing exactly what that reputation is built on.  Here, Dua and Jez trace the creative forces behind Jerusalem, which unfolds across a single day in a fictional rural English village and centres on the anarchic Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron as he resists eviction from the woodland clearing he calls home.   The conversation begins with the real figures and encounters that shaped the play’s characters, before turning to Jez’s instinctive approach to writing and the ideas that underpin Jerusalem. Together, they consider the play’s elusive staying power; as Jez puts it, it lingers like “a great song that you can never work out the meaning of”.  Jerusalem is an exploration of belonging: who is permitted to remain, and who is forced out.  Join the club:  📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]  📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews  📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com  And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the archives this month, we bring you Dua’s conversation with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on her multi award-winning novel Half Of A Yellow Sun from August 2023.   Dua says: “The story takes place in 1960s Nigeria, both before and during the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War. If this is a period of history you are not familiar with, don’t worry, you are not alone. Chimamanda skilfully balances truth and fiction, giving a gripping sense of what was at stake for those who lived through the war and granting this travesty the attention it deserves.”  Together, Dua and Chimamanda explore the cast of characters, delving into themes of class, colonialism, politics and conflict. They also discuss how the novel’s parallel love stories – between Olanna and Odenigbo, and Kainene and Richard – remind us that love, jealousy, infidelity and forgiveness are as present in war as they are in peace.  Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble  Join the club:  📩 Email us your thoughts – [email protected]  📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for more author interviews  📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – and be the first to discover Dua’s next pick – at service95.com  And don’t forget to hit ‘subscribe’ wherever you get your podcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa, she passes the mic to members of our community, inviting them to ask Roxane Gay, author of Dua’s Monthly Read for March, Bad Feminist, the questions they’ve always wanted to know.   Roxane talks about the writers who shaped her, how she protects her mental health when her work puts her in the crosshairs and why firm boundaries make honest writing possible. Perhaps most importantly, Roxane answers one of the weightier questions of our time: can literature ignite a revolution?   Get in touch:        📩 Email us – [email protected]        📲 Follow @service95bookclub and @service95 on Instagram for updates        📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at service95.com         And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the March edition of the Service95 Book Club’s Monthly Read, Dua Lipa sits down with one of the most prominent feminist voices of this generation, Roxane Gay, to discuss her widely celebrated book of essays, Bad Feminist.  In this exclusive video, Roxane Gay reads an essay from the book, Peculiar Benefits. “It’s an essay I wrote when I was trying to think through my relationship to privilege. And how, at times, people are often reluctant to claim privilege, because they are marginalised in other areas of their life,”says Roxane.    Plus, if you haven’t already, be sure to watch Dua and Roxane’s full conversation, which is available to watch now...  Get in touch:  📩 Email us – [email protected]       📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates       📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com  And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For March’s Monthly Read – and in time for International Women’s Day – we are thrilled to be featuring Bad Feminist by American writer, professor, editor and social commentator Roxane Gay.  In this podcast episode, Dua picks some of her favourite essays from Roxane’s 2014 collection, which spans everything from pop culture and politics to race, body image, sexual violence and the complicated expectations placed on women. The pair unpack how the landscape of feminism has shifted in today’s climate but also (and perhaps more importantly) how so much of Roxane’s commentary feels just as relevant today as it did when she first wrote it:  “One of the saddest things about Bad Feminist is most of the essays are still timely.”  Please be warned, this episode is heavy, with discussions of child sexual violence and rape. But it is an incredibly important conversation, confronting today’s relentless news cycles: from the ongoing uncovering of the Epstein files to the wider state of global media reporting and the ways in which coverage of violence against women continues to fall devastatingly short.  There are also lighter moments, where Dua and Roxane bond over their shared love of book clubs. They reflect on the joy that building a community around books brings them – and especially the opportunity to spotlight and uplift writers.  Make sure to watch and listen to one of the greatest voices of contemporary feminism give her take on the world today, the work that still needs to be done to improve the realities for women around the world and how, among all of this incredible work, she still finds time to fit in a game of Scrabble every day…  Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble   Get in touch:       📩 Email us – [email protected]       📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates       📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com       And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Regular listeners of the Service95 Book Club podcast know, as well as our new monthly read author interviews, we love revisiting some of Dua’s most memorable conversations. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is such a universal mother-daughter story, it will always deserve a second, third, even fourth read – making this illuminating conversation between Dua and Michelle from April 2024 worthy of a second, third, even fourth listen. Some of you may already know Michelle as the uber-cool singer and guitarist of the American cult indie band Japanese Breakfast. Here, she also proves herself to be a first-class memoirist, writing with raw honesty about her teenage relationship with her Korean mother and how recreating the traditional dishes her mother used to make helped her process her grief following her death from cancer. Ultimately, it’s a story about love, something everyone can relate to. Buy the book at Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble Get in touch:      📩 Email us – [email protected]      📲 Follow @service95bookclub on Instagram for updates      📚 Subscribe to the Service95 Book Club newsletter – introduced each month by Dua – at www.service95.com      And don’t forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices