‘Utterly humane and utterly brilliant, outwitting computer technology by remaining one step ahead, always, in what can be read and in what order. There are many clever people out there, doing clever things, but it takes great skill to capture the true magic of memory and of lived experience. The Universal Turing Machine does that.’ Lily Dunn, author of Into Being; The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform
In the age of AI, real words by real people.
On the anniversary of computer pioneer Alan Turing’s birthday, in June 2025, Richard Beard’s latest memoir The Universal Turing Machine was published online and made available to read for free.
In The Times, Tom Holland called it: ‘“A memoir”, but that barely scratches the surface of how dazzlingly original and multifaceted an achievement it is.’
Drawing its name from Turing’s hypothetical machine that would one day compute everything computable, the UTM is a memoir with a difference, designed to expand our understanding of what memoir can do. This whole-life memoir offers up at housand words for each year of Beard’s life, from 1967 to 2030, and is presented online only in a chessboard format. The text can be read in multiple different orders, and the many possible ‘knights’ tour’ journeys around the board mirror the way we remember and reflect, leaping across years and decades.
The next phase of The Universal Turing Machine project, welcoming wider creative engagement, is an invitation to writers worldwide to contribute their own creative response using the Universal Turing Machine structural template: up to a thousand words for each year, choosing any span of years. Full details and guidelines are available at www.universalturingmachine.org.
‘A collaborative work of collective autobiography, which, well, is just fcuking great. I really do adore this – a literary experiment and a collective artwork all in one.’ webcurios.co.uk
Here’s Richard’s initial version, at https://universalturingmachine.co.uk/.
Feel free to share. And to think about how you’ll get started on the years of your life.