Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa

Claire Keegan, an acclaimed Irish short-story writer known for concise, emotionally precise fiction, joins to discuss So Late in the Day. They explore a dull man's quiet cruelty and learned misogyny. Conversation touches on cultural context, why Sabine is portrayed as an outsider, language choices, and how small details reveal larger relationship dynamics.

Tomasz Jedrowski, a Polish-German novelist best known for Swimming in the Dark, talks about queer first love set in 1980s communist Poland. He explores writing as a form of coming out, the choice of second‑person narration, and how history, memory and city life shape identity. He also discusses reclaiming lost cultural histories and teases his next novel about humanity’s origins.

Jez Butterworth, award-winning playwright and screenwriter behind Jerusalem and The Ferryman, joins to unpack his process. He traces the idea back to New Year’s Eve 2000. He reveals why the play got its name, which scene was hardest to write, and the rituals he uses to begin writing.

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 – ⁠books@service95.com⁠  📲 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

Jez Butterworth, award-winning British playwright behind Jerusalem and The Ferryman, joins to discuss the play’s real-life inspirations and creative process. He talks about the local characters and traveller camps that fed the story. He explains his instinctive, music-driven writing, the Rooster Byron figure, and why the play’s ambiguity and rituals keep people talking.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian novelist renowned for Half of a Yellow Sun, reflects on the Biafran War and why she wrote the novel as an act of remembrance. She explores characters and the intertwining of love and conflict. Conversations touch on class, colonialism, women's wartime roles, storytelling choices, and language use in portraying history.

Roxane Gay, writer, professor, and cultural critic known for Bad Feminist, answers listener questions and reflects on writing. She discusses fear as a guide, setting firm boundaries to protect mental health, and the writers and mentors who shaped her. She also debates whether literature can spark collective action and the role of writers in civic life.

Roxane Gay, author, cultural critic, and professor, reads from Bad Feminist and reflects on privilege. She recounts trips to Haiti and how an American passport shaped her views. She defines different forms of privilege and wrestles with being both advantaged and marginalized. She challenges online privilege policing and urges listeners to start acknowledging relative privilege.

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 – books@service95.com       📲 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

Michelle Zauner, singer-guitarist of Japanese Breakfast and memoirist, reflects on family, food and survival. She talks about how Korean groceries unlock memories. She discusses learning Korean, caregiving, and turning grief into writing. She also contrasts her music and author identities and describes adapting her memoir for film.