Chloe Aridjis
| Chloe Aridjis |
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Chloe Aridjis reading from Book of Clouds
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| Born | New York City |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Mexican and American |
| Alma mater | Harvard and Oxford |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Notable works | Book of Clouds, Asunder |
| Notable awards | Prix du Premier Roman Etranger (France), Guggenheim Fellowship (USA) |
| Relatives | Homero Aridjis, Eva Aridjis |
| Website | |
| www |
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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. 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, for whom she worked as a stills photographer. She has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from Oxford University.
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'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. 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, Cervantes, Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Baudelaire,Nerval, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Walser. Other favourite authors include Gaston Bachelard, Lautréamont and Rene Daumal.
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Wikipedia