Top ten books about Colombia

Julianne Pachico was born in 1985 in Cambridge, England. She grew up in Cali, Colombia, where her parents worked in international as agricultural social scientists.

In 2004 she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she completed her B.A. at Reed College in Comparative Literature. In 2012 she returned to England in order to complete her M.A. in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where she was a recipient of UEA's Creative Writing International Scholarship. She also holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from UEA.

Pachico's latest novel is The Anthill.

At the Guardian she tagged her ten favorite books about Colombia, including:

Liveforever by Andrés Caicedo, translated by Frank Wynne

A cult novel, the Spanish title of Liveforever is ¡Que viva la música! (Long Live Music!). Music is the book’s obsessive focus, as the story follows a young woman’s infatuation with salsa and rock, and her slow but steady descent into the underbelly of Cali, my home town. Nothing and no one is off limits, and there are no boundaries. Caicedo killed himself at the age 25, and the chaotic energy and underlying melancholy of Liveforever make you realise what a terrible loss his death was to literature.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue