Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra collects objects. Born in New Delhi in 1990 and trained as a printmaker at OCAD University in Toronto and then at Concordia University in Montréal, she turned to oral history after handling heirlooms that families carried across the border during the 1947 Partition of India. That work became Remnants of a Separation (2017), which rebuilds the period through twenty-one surviving possessions, and In the Language of Remembering (2022), on what the generations since have inherited. In 2017 she also co-founded the Museum of Material Memory, a crowdsourced archive of household objects from the subcontinent. The Book of Everlasting Things, published by HarperCollins in 2022, is her first novel. Samir, apprenticed to a Hindu perfumer in Lahore, and Firdaus, a Muslim calligrapher, are separated when the border is drawn, and scent and script become the two ways they hold on to a city they have lost.