The Universal Turing Machine has now expanded to a 3×3 grid of memoirs. Eight writers have written their lives to the Turing Machine structural template and these memoirs are available to read at https://universalturingmachine.co.uk/. As was always the intention with the Universal Turing Machine, there’s something here for everyone. Have a look around, read a […]
The Author is the Journal of the Society of Authors, the invaluable trade union for writers (since 1884). This piece about The Universal Turing Machine appeared in the Spring 2026 edition. Ill-served by story Richard Beard on harnessing new technology using experimental narrative forms My first encounter with digital fiction, back in 2011, was with […]
You can now buy your own private UTM grid for drafts and experiments, and to share with family and friends. It comes with a login, a password and full instructions and costs £60 for six months. The money raised from subscribing to a personal grid will be used to help sustain the UTM project into […]
This is a longer piece with some of the thinking behind The Universal Turing Machine. Everyone who embarks on a Turing Machine memoir notices at some stage that it’s fun. It’s a fun way to write, when writing is often difficult. It’s also important. Our memories are something we have to share, and one of […]
Here’s the Guardian obituary I wrote for Ian, who will be remembered and missed by many.
Everyone has memories. And according to the old saying, we all have a book in us. Put these thoughts together and everyone has a memoir in them. UTM feature Scotsman
Chine McDonald discovers The Universal Turing Machine on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. Today programme UTM
Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and […]
My version of the Universal Turing Machine is only the beginning. The idea is that writers everywhere can use the thousand-words-a-year format to add their own memoir to an ever-growing chessboard, which will eventually become a neural network of memories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a Domesday Book recording individual human experience […]
Click here for a brief How-To preview. Then here to get started for yourself. So much to discover.