Chloe Aridjis is a London-based Mexican novelist and writer. Her 2009 novel Book of Clouds was published in eight countries, and won the French Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. Her second novel, Asunder, was first published in May 2013, to unanimous acclaim in the UK., followed by Sea Monsters, 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 makerEva Aridjis, for whom she worked as a stills photographer. She has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford University.
Biography
Born in New York City, U.S., Chloe Aridjis grew up in Mexico City and the Netherlands, where her father served as Mexico's ambassador. She studied comparative literature at Harvard and then wrote a thesis on "Night and the Poetic Self" in Baudelaire'sLes 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. Her book of essays on Magic and Poetry in Nineteenth-century France was released in 2005. 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 Gogol, Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Kafka, Miguel de Cervantes, Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser. Other favourite authors include Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont and Rene Daumal. Her doctoral thesis was published in Spanish as Topografía de lo insólito: La magia y lo fantástico literario en la Francia del siglo XIX. 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. After five years in Berlin currently resides in London. She taught on the literary novels MA at City University London. She has been vegetarian since 1986. Her first novelBook of Clouds was published in the US by Grove Press in winter 2009, and by Chatto and Windus in the UK in July 2009, in the Netherlands, and by Mercure de France in September 2009. It came out in Mexico, Spain, Romania and Croatia in 2011 and as a graphic novel in French in early 2012. Reviewing Book of Clouds for The Independent, Daniel Hahn described it as an "exceptional debut novel". In The New York Times, Wendy Lesser described Book of Clouds 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 Etranger 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 deals with two museum guards, one at the National Gallery in London, for whom life and art begin to overtake each other in surreal and unsettling ways. It involves a trip to Paris, and carefully contained worlds torn apart. The Times Literary Supplement wrote, "Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange ... This is deft and shimmering fiction" while 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." Sea Monsters won The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020. Aridjis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2020 she was awarded the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award for a future 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 occasionally writes for frieze and other art journals. In February 2016 her translation of her father's book The Child Poet came out in English.
