Dua Lipa

Dua Lipa is an English pop singer and songwriter, born on 22 August 1995 in London. Her parents, Anesa and Dukagjin Lipa, are Kosovo Albanians from Pristina, which is why she has a place among the artists of Kosovo here; her father's family traces its roots further back to Peja. Her awards include seven Brit Awards and three Grammy Awards.

Music came from home. Her father was the singer and guitarist of the Kosovar rock band Oda and kept playing at home, from his own songs to David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Radiohead. She grew up in West Hampstead and took weekend singing lessons at the Sylvia Young Theatre School from the age of nine. In 2008 the family moved to Pristina, where she went to school and learned more Albanian. At 15 she returned alone to London, finished school and posted cover versions on YouTube.

She signed with Warner Bros. Records in 2014 and released her first single, "New Love", in August 2015; "Be the One" followed in October and went to number one in Belgium, Poland and Slovakia. Her debut album, Dua Lipa, came out on 2 June 2017. Its single "New Rules" became her first UK number one, the first by a female solo artist since Adele's "Hello" in 2015. In 2018 she won the Brit Awards for British Female Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act, and "One Kiss" with Calvin Harris was the best-selling song of the year in the UK. In 2019 she won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist.

Future Nostalgia (2020) was her first UK number-one album. "Don't Start Now" had the longest top-ten stay for a British female artist on the UK Singles Chart, and "Levitating" topped the Billboard year-end Hot 100 for 2021. The album won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year and the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album, and her 2021 duet with Elton John, "Cold Heart (Pnau remix)", gave her another UK number one.

In 2023 she sang "Dance the Night" for the film Barbie, in which she also made her acting debut, and the song became her fourth UK number one. Her third album, Radical Optimism, went straight to the top of the UK Albums Chart in May 2024, led by "Houdini", "Training Season" and "Illusion", and in June 2024 she closed the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. With her father she set up the Sunny Hill Foundation in 2016 to raise money for people in financial difficulty in Kosovo.