This paper introduces a five-parameter lifetime model called the exponentiated Kumaraswamy power Lindley distribution, that extends the power Lindley distribution and some well-known distributions. Various structural properties of the new model including expansions for the density function, explicit expressions for the ordinary and conditional moments, residual and reversed residual life functions and mean deviations are derived. The maximum likelihood method is used to estimate the model parameters. The usefulness and flexibility of the proposed model are illustrated empirically by means of two real data sets.