Dua Lipa’s smile has a way of lighting up the room, and the wattage was in full display during her conversation with Mustafa the poet, the rave making Sudanese Canadian poet, singer, songwriter and filmmaker.
The Grammy Award winner, the moving spirit behind the Service95 Book Club and curator of the 2026 Southbank book festival in her conversation with the poet on Saturday 24 October 2026 described Mustafa as a friend with whom she shares poems noting that “I really have poetry in my life because of Mustafa.”
Before sitting down for their conversation, the audience in the packed Royal Festival Hall was treated to riveting poetry reading from special guest poets, Safia Elhillo and Victoria Chang.
Sudanese American, Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, Home Is Not a Country, and Bright Red Fruit, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Howard Foundation and Stanford University, and her awards include a California Book Award, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and an Arab American Book Award.
Victoria Chang’s latest collection of poetry is Tree of Knowledge (Corsair, 2026), which has been longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of With My Back to the World (Corsair, 2024), which received the Forward Prize for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything and Dear Memory.
Responding to a question from Lipa, Mustafa said his sister led him to poetry. “She would say let’s torture him. Let it be poetry.”
He would go ahead to gain recognition as a poet at the tender age of 12, and Dua Lipa delighted the audience with a short video of Mustafa reciting his first publicly presented poem.
“Don’t let me be the single rose in this run-down park” the teenager recited.
That run-down park was Regent’s Park in Toronto where he grew up close to “the busiest intersection in Canada.”
Mustafa has evolved and grown from that humble beginning into a globally renowned wordsmith whose latest poetry collection, Nour, which featured Channing Tatum and Pedro Pascal amongst others has been described as a “meditation on religious devotion, love, grief, and the beauty of everyday rituals.”
The book which Mustafa made available for free online in 2025 draws on “themes of faith, ceremony and worship.”
Nour means light in Arabic and there was something luminous about the conversation between the two.
On why he made the book free for all, Mustafa said, “I think all of that work has to belong to everybody.”
Speaking further on what poetry means to him, Mustaf described poetry as “a heavy door, like a church door” before adding that in writing poetry “you are trying to find a new language.”
Mustafa said his favourite poem in the world is “the one I cannot understand” leading Dua Lipa to add that “poetry can be intimidating to writers and readers of poetry.”
Responding to Dua Lipa’s question on why he has not published a “collection of your own work” Mustafa said “I don’t feel I’m prepared for it. My greatest heroes of poetry were in their sixties when they reached the summit of their mountains.”
Speaking further he added that “I think of poetry as a work that only grows with age.”
Expanding on their friendship, Dua Lipa informed the surprised audience that “Mustafa married me and my husband Callum” before dedicating a poem, “Ode to Friendship” by Noor Hindi to Mustafa.
Edgewater Beach, 2019
The night so warm I could fall in love
with anything
including myself. My loves. You are the only people
I’d surrender my softness to.
The moon so blue. And yes, what’s gold
is gold. What’s real
is us despite
a country so grieved, so woke, so death.
Our gloom as loud as shells…