Chloe Aridjis

Mexican American novelist and writer (born 1971)

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.

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. Gérard de Nerval, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Walter Benjamin, Robert Walser,

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). Aridjis lived in Berlin for five years, and currently resides in London. She has been vegetarian since 1986. In The New York Times, Wendy Lesser described it as "a stunningly accurate portrait of Berlin". Regina Marler in the Los Angeles Times drew attention to Aridjis's "magic and poetry", and described "an unsettling atmosphere unlike anything in recent fiction." In November 2009, Book of Clouds won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Her second novel, Asunder, was published in May 2013 by Chatto and Windus in London, and in September by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York City. It involves a trip to Paris, and carefully contained worlds torn apart. The Times Literary Supplement wrote of it: "Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange  This is deft and shimmering fiction"; The Guardian described the novel as "Strange, extravagant, darkly absorbing  thrills with energy." Her third novel, Sea Monsters, was published in February 2019. The New Yorker referred to it as "a hypnotic narrative of disenchantment", while The Atlantic called it "a strange symbolist novel that would make Mallarmé proud" and wrote: "Like a magician, Aridjis is obsessed with elusiveness; like a symbolist, she far prefers imagination and metaphor to plain sight." Aridjis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2020, she was awarded the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award for her forthcoming novel entitled Reports from the Land of the Bats. She was co curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool that opened in March 2015 and she occasionally writes for frieze and other art journals. In 2018 she starred in Josh Appignanesi's arthouse film "Female Human Animal." In February 2016, her English translation of her father's book The Child Poet was published. Aridjis is a member of Writers Rebel, a group of writers that focuses on the climate emergency. She is particularly interested in issues involving species extinction, and animal welfare in general.

Magic and the Literary Fantastique in Nineteenth Century France. University of Oxford, 2002. Topografía de lo insólito. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 2005. Book of Clouds. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009. Sea Monsters. Chatto & Windus, 2019. Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery. House Sparrow Press, 2021. ISBN 978 1 913513 29 0.