Julian Pavia

Julian Pavia is an executive editor acquiring thriller, mystery, suspense, science-fiction, and fantasy. He’s especially drawn to books with speculative elements that can cross over to a wide commercial audience or that play with genre in unexpected ways. He’s a sucker for a great first-person voice and for novels with that extra dose of verisimilitude and detail. His best-known projects include Max Brooks’s Devolution, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Ready Player Two, Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter and Recursion, and Andy Weir’s The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Other authors include Robert Jackson Bennett, Peter Clines, Rob Hart, Scott Hawkins, Thomas D. Lee, Beth Lewis, Robbie Morrison, and Scott Sigler. Julian joined Ballantine in 2019 after fifteen years at Crown, where he also published nonfiction across numerous categories.