Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican American novelist who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After studying at Harvard University, she earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where her research focused on nineteenth-century French poetry and magic. Alongside her fiction, she has written extensively about art and served as guest curator of an exhibition devoted to the British-Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Her representative novel, "Sea Monsters," is set in Mexico in the late 1980s and follows seventeen-year-old Luisa, who leaves Mexico City with a boy she barely knows and travels to the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. Fascinated by reports of a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have supposedly escaped from a Soviet circus, Luisa searches for them while drifting through the beach community of Zipolite. Blending her inner fantasies with the realities of life as a runaway, the novel traces the excitement, uncertainty, and gradual disenchantment of adolescence. "Sea Monsters" received the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
