A six-page, unfinished short story by Alan Turing has been fully transcribed and subjected to literary analysis for the first time by Professor Sarah Dillon of Cambridge University's Faculty of English (The Guardian). The story, titled 'Pryce's Buoy', had been known to Turing specialists but had never undergone systematic literary study before Dillon's work. The Guardian published its feature interview with Dillon on July 24, 2026, following her presentation of the material at Cambridge's Multi-disciplinary Gender Research Seminars on November 17, 2025 (University of Cambridge, gender.cam.ac.uk).

Dillon believes Turing wrote 'Pryce's Buoy' in late 1952 or early 1953, the year after his arrest in Manchester for gross indecency — the charge used in mid-twentieth-century Britain to criminalize homosexual acts. The story centers on two characters: Ron Miller, a working-class sex worker, and Alec Pryce, a scientist celebrated for an invention called 'Pryce's buoy'. Dillon identifies the Pryce character as autofictional, meaning a fictionalized version of the author himself — a literary device where writers embed their own experiences into invented characters. This biographical and legal context anchors the manuscript in the period of Turing's conviction and subsequent chemical castration, placing it at the intersection of mid-century British criminalization of homosexuality and private literary expression.

Dillon's reappraisal directly challenges the prevailing public image of Turing as an isolated, humourless figure. Drawing on the text's tone and content, Dillon argues that the author was 'playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex'. She extends this critique to popular cultural portrayals, specifically the 2014 film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Dillon characterizes the film as historically inaccurate, arguing that it constructed a 'Hollywood lone hero' narrative rather than faithfully representing the historical record.

The Guardian's coverage is an original feature and interview, not a summary of a separately published academic paper. However, Dillon's formal scholarly output on the manuscript is forthcoming. Her academic paper, titled "'Pryce's Buoy': Alan Turing's Autofictional Short Story", is scheduled for publication in The Review of English Studies in July 2026 (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English). She is also currently writing two related book-length projects: Turing and Me and Turing's Literature: An Alternative History of Influence (EurekAlert).

Dillon's current title is Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities at Cambridge. She read English at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1998, and later earned an M.A. in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick in 1999 and a D.Phil. in English from the University of Sussex in 2004. She taught at the University of St Andrews from 2006 to 2014, rising from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, before joining the Cambridge Faculty of English in 2014. She held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in the 2024–25 academic year and became a Fellow of the English Association (FEA) in 2026 (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English).

Her scholarly credentials extend deeply into the institutional infrastructure surrounding both literary studies and the humanities' engagement with technology. She serves as General Editor of the Routledge book series 'Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays' and sits on the editorial boards of Public Humanities and C21: Journal of Twenty-First Century Writing. At Cambridge, she serves on the Management Committee of CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), the Management Board of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and the Advisory Board of the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space. She is also part of the Academic Advisory Network for the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English).

Dillon's path to this Turing scholarship was paved by her prior interdisciplinary engagements. She was previously Programme Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) and served as co-Principal Investigator of the Cambridge Mellon Sawyer Seminar 'Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power' from May 2020 to December 2021. She has also previously served as Chair of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies and as Director of the Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Her current work on Turing is directly informed by her previous collaborative research on AI Narratives, providing a methodological bridge between computational history and literary analysis (University of Cambridge, Faculty of English).

The broader context here is not merely the surfacing of a lost literary curiosity but the potential recalibration of the Turing biographical canon. The dominant historical and pop-cultural narratives have heavily emphasized Turing's mathematical genius and his tragic death, often sidelining the texture of his personal life and interior world. By applying the frameworks of autofiction and queer literary theory to a primary document written during a period of acute personal crisis, Dillon is effectively contesting the boundaries of the Turing archive itself. Moving the analysis of Turing beyond the history of science and into literary studies repositions him not just as a foundational figure in computer science but as a writer engaging with his own identity through the literary conventions of his time. This transition from an archival footnote to an object of sustained literary critique opens new avenues for assessing how Turing understood and narrativized his own experience.