The first phase of the Universal Turing Machine is now available to read free online.
‘Utterly humane and utterly brilliant,’ Lily Dunn, author of Into Being; The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform. ‘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.’
The second phase, welcoming wider creative engagement, launches in September 2025. This is an invitation to writers worldwide to contribute their own creative response following the Universal Turing Machine template of a thousand words for each year, choosing any span of years. Full details and guidelines will be released at the official launch of the second phase on September 1. In the meantime, here are a few commonly asked questions answered in brief:
Why did you decide to create this project?
As a repository for human experience as remembered in writing, in a form that maps onto the way the experience of thought has felt to me – an (apparently) random set of leaps, back into the past and forward to the future. We never stop thinking, never stop time travelling.
Why do you include future years in your chessboard?
One of the limitations of memoir is getting stuck in the past, whereas a true account of how it feels to have been alive needs to account for anticipation, for ambition, for dreams. The future shapes lives as surely as the past.
Why do you see memoir as so important?
AI will come for genre writing first, recognising and re-iterating the formulas of crime novels, for example, or romances. Memoir is a redoubt, a bastion of authentic material to be expressed uniquely in a single writer’s voice: what anyone remembers is theirs alone.
Who do you hope will participate?
Anyone with memories they want to record and pass on. My experience as a teacher has shown me how much well-written and fascinating material is out there – I hope The Universal Turing Machine will give some of that material, in the field of memoir, a platform.
How do you envisage younger people participating – does everyone have to create a 64-square chessboard and if so can they imagine the years before their birth or the distant future?
Absolutely. The format of the UTM is designed to encourage a creative response, to the years before memory and years still to be lived. A younger writer will have more freedom in the years yet to come, an older writer might decide to merge earlier years to fit the 64 boxes of the UTM chessboard. These are creative decisions I’m confident writers will meet with flair and originality.
I want to take part! What do I do next?
Start thinking about filling those 1000-word squares! The project officially launches with a call for submissions on September 1st, when full details and guidelines will be revealed, including the 2026 deadline for the first round of new memoirs to be published online in Summer 2026.