Julianne Pachico Books in Order

Julianne Pachico was born in Cambridge, England, in 1985, but she spent most of her childhood in Cali, Colombia, where her parents worked in international development as agricultural social scientists. She lived there until she was eighteen. That mix of places matters in her fiction. Her books often move between countries, classes, and versions of the past, and they return again and again to Colombia, both as a real place and as a place remembered from far away.

At eighteen, she left Colombia and moved to Portland, Oregon. She studied Comparative Literature at Reed College, building the kind of wide reading life that later shows up in the shape and ambition of her own work. In 2012 she returned to England for an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she received the university's Creative Writing International Scholarship. She later completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing there.

Distance turned out to be useful.

Pachico has said that leaving Colombia helped her see it differently, and that perspective shaped her first book. For The Lucky Ones, she chose a linked form, part story collection and part novel, because it let her move between voices and social worlds. The book follows wealthy schoolgirls, housekeepers, teachers, guerrillas, and others caught in the long shadow of violence. Readers who like it tend to respond to the way it feels both grounded and slightly off-kilter, with realism, dread, and dark humor all sharing the same air.

Her next book, The Anthill, brings some of those concerns into a stranger key. Lina returns to Medellín after years in England and finds that memory, guilt, and class are harder to untangle than she hoped. The novel leans into social horror and satire without losing sight of grief. That mix, sharp observation, unease, and emotional messiness, is one of Pachico's signatures.

Then came Jungle House, a more openly speculative novel. A young woman grows up in the jungle under the care of an artificial intelligence called Mother, while rebellion stirs outside the fence. Even when Pachico shifts toward the future, she stays interested in the same human questions: who gets protected, who gets watched, what stories families tell, and what happens when a sealed world starts to crack.

She can be eerie without getting vague.

Before and alongside the novels, Pachico built a strong short-fiction record. Her story “Honey Bunny” appeared in The New Yorker, and her work has also been published in Granta, The White Review, and Lighthouse. Her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She was longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and she is the only writer to have two stories in Best British Short Stories 2015. An early stand-alone piece, The Tourists, shows many of her recurring interests in miniature: status, fear, social performance, and the sense that a polished surface can break at any moment.

She holds dual U.S. and U.K. citizenship. After teaching Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University from 2017 to 2019, she joined the University of East Anglia, where she is now a Lecturer in Creative Writing and co-convenor of the MA in Prose Fiction. That teaching life fits the work. Her books are carefully made, but they never feel cold. Again and again, she writes about how violence lingers, how identity shifts, and how a person can carry one country inside another.