A short, unfinished story by Alan Turing has been read and studied closely for the first time by Professor Sarah Dillon of Cambridge University (The Guardian). The story is called 'Pryce's Buoy'. People who study Turing already knew it existed, but no one had given it a careful literary analysis before Dillon did. The Guardian published an interview with Dillon on July 24, 2026. She had first presented her findings at a Cambridge seminar on November 17, 2025 (University of Cambridge, gender.cam.ac.uk).

Dillon thinks Turing wrote the story in late 1952 or early 1953. That was the year after he was arrested in Manchester for 'gross indecency' — the legal term Britain used at the time to criminalize homosexual acts. The story is about two characters: Ron Miller, a working-class sex worker, and Alec Pryce, a scientist famous for inventing something called 'Pryce's buoy'. Dillon says the Pryce character is basically Turing writing himself into the story — a technique where an author turns their own life into fiction. This means the story was written during one of the most painful periods of Turing's life, right after his conviction and during the chemical castration he was forced to undergo as punishment.

Dillon's reading pushes back against the way most people picture Turing today: as a lonely, serious, distant genius. Based on the story's tone and content, Dillon describes the real Turing as 'playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex'. She also takes aim at the 2014 film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Dillon calls the film historically inaccurate, saying it turned Turing into a 'Hollywood lone hero' instead of showing who he really was.

The Guardian article is an original interview, not a summary of an academic paper. But Dillon's formal research is on the way. Her paper, titled "'Pryce's Buoy': Alan Turing's Autofictional Short Story", will be published in The Review of English Studies in July 2026 (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English). She is also writing two books related to this work: Turing and Me and Turing's Literature: An Alternative History of Influence (EurekAlert).

Dillon is a Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities at Cambridge. She studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1998. She then earned a master's degree in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick in 1999 and a doctorate in English from the University of Sussex in 2004. She taught at the University of St Andrews from 2006 to 2014, becoming a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. She joined the Cambridge Faculty of English in 2014. She held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2024–25 and became a Fellow of the English Association in 2026 (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English).

She also holds several leadership roles. She is the General Editor of a Routledge book series called 'Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays' and serves on the editorial boards of two journals, Public Humanities and C21: Journal of Twenty-First Century Writing. At Cambridge, she sits on management committees for CRASSH (a research center for the arts, social sciences, and humanities) and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. She is also on advisory boards for the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space and the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English).

Dillon's path to studying Turing grew out of her earlier work connecting literature and technology. She was previously Programme Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and co-led a seminar called 'Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power' from May 2020 to December 2021. She has also chaired the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies and directed the Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Her current work on Turing builds directly on her earlier research into how people tell stories about artificial intelligence, bridging the gap between the history of computing and literary analysis (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English).

The broader context here is about more than finding an old story in an archive. Most accounts of Turing's life focus on his mathematical brilliance and his tragic death in 1954. His personal life and inner world usually get left out. By treating this story as a serious literary work — one written during a time of deep personal crisis — Dillon is pushing the boundaries of what counts as part of Turing's legacy. She is asking people to see Turing not only as a pioneer of computer science but also as a writer who used fiction to make sense of who he was. That shift, from a forgotten manuscript to a text worth studying in its own right, opens new ways to understand how Turing saw himself and his place in the world.