Chloe Gong

INFO

Name	Chloe Gong (she/her)
Born	1998
Country of Birth	China
Place of Residence	New York City
Ethnicities	Chinese
Artform	Literature
Decades Active	2020s

ABOUT

Chloe Gong is a New York Times-bestselling author who has written primarily for a young adult audience.

Born in Shanghai and raised on the North Shore in Tāmaki Makaurau, Gong started writing books at the age of thirteen, completing one manuscript each year until the age of 22. In 2018, during her first year of university, Gong wrote These Violent Delights. The novel was published in 2020 by Simon and Schuster, her debut novel and the first of a duology.

In These Violent Delights, Gong reimagines Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in 1920s Shanghai. The young adult, historical fantasy romance became a New York Times bestseller. Our Violent Ends, its sequel, was published in 2021, and the duology became popularly discussed on BookTok, the bookish community of TikTok. NPR described it as “a rich portrait of a seldom-depicted time and place” while The Spinoff called it “a lovely example of how these sometimes ungainly but intermittently brilliant novels take Shakespeare’s YA romance and turn it up to 11.” Gong was awarded Best Youth Novel for her debut novel at the 2021 Sir Julius Vogel Awards, which celebrate science-fiction, fantasy, and horror literature from Aotearoa.

In an interview with F(r)iction, Gong said: “From about thirteen onwards, whenever I was writing a book, that character would be my age, because as I was growing up, I was putting myself into the pages.” She grew up mainly reading young adult fiction and said she “loved it when there’s a plot but also a couple to root for in the sub-plot”. Gong said the main theme in These Violent Delights was “to choose love in a place of hate”. In an interview with Newsroom, she cited young adult fantasy authors Cassandra Clare and Laini Taylor as inspirations.

Gong published Foul Lady Fortune in 2022 and Foul Heart Huntsman in 2023, a YA historical thriller duology that retells Shakespeare’s As You Like It. As a spinoff of These Violent Delights, it follows Rosalind Lang, one of the characters from her former series.

In 2023, Gong published Last Violent Call, a collection of two novellas — A Foul Thing and This Foul Murder — which connect the two duologies. These three books exist in the same universe as These Violent Delights, and the five books are known collectively as the Secret Shanghai novels.

Gong is currently writing her first adult series, an epic fantasy trilogy titled Flesh and False Gods. Immortal Longings (2023), the first book, revolves around a set of deadly games and is inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The second and third books are scheduled for release in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

Gong attended Rangitoto College. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and now lives in New York.