Season 1 · Open for entries
StoryHunt
In 1972 Idi Amin gave 80,000 Indians ninety days to leave Uganda. Some of them were your grandparents. Almost none of those stories got written down.
I am Saurabh Garg. I write other people’s life stories for a living. For Season 1 I am looking for ten stories from the Indian diaspora, and I read every entry myself.
I have written an authorised biography of a doyen of the Indian IT industry, a published novel, and twenty-two years of other people’s sentences. The ten stories chosen for Season 1 get a proper interview and go into a book.
What I am looking for
The story your family tells at the table and has never written down. The one that starts with a person doing something specific on a specific day.
The leaving
Who decided, what got packed, what got left. The trunk. The ninety days. The one photograph that came.
The first year
The job below your qualification. The landlord. The cold. The food you could not find, and what you cooked instead.
The thing nobody mentions
A business that failed. A marriage that did not survive the move. A brother who stayed.
The object
A ledger, a passport with the wrong name on it, a letter in a language your children cannot read.
The return
Going back and finding the house, or finding a mall where the house was.
What does not work is the CV. Arrived, studied, worked, prospered. I have read that one. So has everybody.
What happens if I pick yours
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I write to you and we book a call.Nothing happens without you knowing about it first.
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I interview you properly.Two hours or more, recorded, the same way I interview a paying client. Then I go and check the things that can be checked.
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You read it before anyone else does.You can ask for changes. You can pull it entirely, up to the moment it goes to print, and I will not ask why.
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It runs under your name.On this site and in the Season 1 anthology. Under initials or a first name instead, if that is what you want.
What this is not
No prize, no leaderboard
There is no entry fee now and there will not be one later. Nobody is ranked against anybody.
You keep the copyright
You give me a licence to publish it here and in the book. You can still sell it, post it, or put it in your own book.
Nothing published raw
No entry goes public as it arrives. Nothing about a living person runs until that person has agreed.
The part most open calls skip
There is no publisher. Season 1 is mine to fund and I am funding it. Ten stories, one book, and I will say on this page what it cost and what it earned when it is done.
If you are not picked, I still write to you and tell you so. One person reads every entry, no panel and no intern, and that person is me.
If you want to know how I write before you trust me with something from your family, read Answers or the biography work.
Send me your story
Takes about twenty minutes if you have the story straight. Longer if you have to ring your mother, and ringing your mother is usually the right move.
Questions
Do I have to be a writer?
No. I would rather have it rough. I do the writing. What I need from you is what happened, who it happened to, and the details only your family would know.
Can I write in Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil or Punjabi?
Send it in whichever language it lives in. Paste it in the box or link a document. I will get it translated and then check the translation with you line by line before anything is published.
It is my grandmother’s story, not mine. Can I send it?
Yes, and say so in the form. If she is living I will want to interview her, with you there if that helps. If she has died I will work from you and from whatever is left, the letters and the papers and the photographs.
Who owns the story after I send it?
You do. You keep the copyright. You give me a licence to publish it on this site and in the Season 1 book. You can still sell it, post it or put it in your own book. The terms spell this out.
What if the story names people who are still alive?
Tell me in the form. Nothing about a living person gets published until that person has agreed, or until the story has been changed enough that they are not identifiable. This is the reason I ask early instead of late.
Can I stay anonymous?
Yes. Say so and I will publish it under initials or a first name only. I still need your real name and email so I can talk to you.
How long should it be?
Three hundred words is enough to see whether it is there. Three thousand is fine too. I have never rejected a story for being short.
When do you close?
Season 1 closes on 31 October 2026. If I have ten I believe in before then, I will say so on this page and stop reading. If I do not, the ten becomes however many are worth it.
Do you pay?
No fee for a story. If yours runs in the book you get copies, your name on it, and the interview itself, which is the part people tell me they wanted.
Can I send more than one?
Send the best one first. If I pick it we will talk about the others.
One more thing
If you are reading this and thinking of someone else, your uncle in Leicester, your neighbour in Scarborough, the man at the Dubai office who never talks about Karachi, send them this page. Ask them to put your name in the box that asks who sent them.
The stories that get lost are the ones everybody assumed somebody else had written down.