Chloe Aridjis

Chloe Aridjis (born 1971) is a Mexican and American novelist and writer. Her novel Book of Clouds (2009) was published in eight countries, and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. Her second novel, Asunder was published in 2013 to unanimous acclaim. Her third novel, Sea Monsters (2019), was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020. She is the eldest daughter of Mexican poet and diplomat Homero Aridjis and American Betty F. de Aridjis, an environmental activist and translator. She is the sister of film maker Eva Aridjis. She has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from the University of Oxford. Biography Born in New York City, Chloe Aridjis grew up in Mexico City and the Netherlands, where her father served as Mexico's ambassador. Aridjis studied comparative literature at Harvard University and wrote a thesis on "Night and the Poetic Self" in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Malcolm Bowie before completing a doctorate on "the interface between high and popular art in nineteenth-century France with a special focus on the relationship between poetry, magic shows and literature of the fantastic". As a teenager she had a bilingual exposure to pop in Mexico City, listening to British bands while discovering their Mexican equivalents at a gay goth club. She met great poets such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ted Hughes at international poetry festivals her parents organised in the early 1980s. This had a lasting effect on Aridjis, who maintained a correspondence with several of them throughout her adolescence. Her favourite authors include Nikolai Gogol, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes, Edgar Allan Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Walter Benjamin, Robert Walser, Gaston Bachelard, Comte de Lautréamont and René Daumal. Her book of essays on Magic and the Literary Fantastique in Nineteenth-Century France was published in 2002. Her doctoral thesis was published in Spanish as Topografía de lo insólito: La magia y lo fantástico literario en la Francia del siglo XIX (Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 2005). She publishes in journals and newspapers in England, Mexico, among them essays for Granta on insomnia and the psychological fallout of space travel on Soviet cosmonauts. Aridjis lived in Berlin for five years, and currently resides in London.