‘Pryce’s Buoy’, a six-page, scruffily hand-written fragment of a short story cared for by archivists at King’s College Cambridge has been transcribed and fully studied for the first time. Professor Sarah Dillon’s findings, published today in The Review of English Studies, call for a reassessment of Turing’s character.

“We’ve distilled a version of Turing that is a two-dimensional stereotype,” says Professor Dillon. “He’s come to be seen as socially unaware, entirely concerned with logic and numbers, and pretty isolated. His short story reveals a very different man: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex.”

Link to the full University of Cambridge Research Feature, by Tom Almeroth-Williams: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/alan-turing-short-story

Link to Professor Dillon’s article in The Review of English Studies: https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res/hgag047/8740175