Cambridge University English literature professor Sarah Dillon transcribed and studied a short story written by Alan Turing. Her findings regarding the manuscript were published in the Review of English Studies in 2026.

The short story is titled Pryce’s Buoy. The manuscript for the work is held in the archives at King’s College, Cambridge. It is a six-page incomplete story that had largely been sidelined and overlooked prior to Dillon's study. The handwriting of the Pryce’s Buoy manuscript was hard to read.

She believes Turing wrote Pryce’s Buoy in late 1952 or early 1953. Turing wrote the piece in the year after his arrest in Manchester for gross indecency. Turing was arrested in Manchester in 1952 for gross indecency.

In 1952, he agreed to chemical castration rather than go to jail. Turing also took a summer holiday in Norway in 1952.

The characters in Pryce’s Buoy are Ron Miller, a working-class sex worker, and Alec Pryce, a scientist. In the story, Alec Pryce is famed for an invention in his 20s known as “Pryce’s buoy”. The narrator of the text switches between Alec’s inner monologue and Ron’s perspective. She stated that the character Alec Pryce is autofictional and represents Turing.

Turing writes in the story: “Ron caught Alec’s eye and gave him a half-hearted smile. It was enough though.” Ron wonders in the text: “could he be mistaken? No, he was having a furtive look. Just a bit shy.” Alec’s impression of Ron is described as “not a real beauty, but [he] had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.” Turing writes of Ron: “If he let someone take him under the arches for 10 minutes he might get five bob.” The story also notes that Ron “didn’t go in for lah-di-dah ways of talking. It’d come to the same anyway. Bed’s bed whatever way you get into it. Alec thought otherwise.”

She said: “I love the hesitancy, the way it evokes the uncertainty of potential sexual encounter, the ‘am I reading this situation wrong?’ worry. ‘Am I going to put my foot in it? Am I going to go too far? What did they want? What do I want? Can I back out?’” She added: “Turing gets those tensions, the leaning in and backing out. He does it really well.”

She is certain that Turing was influenced by the writer Angus Wilson. She stated there is clear evidence of Turing copying phrases and narrative technique from Wilson’s novel Hemlock and After. “It’s completely normal that Turing copied Wilson. When you start trying your hand as a creative writer, you copy what inspires you. It’s a kind of scaffolding because writing creatively is scary,” she said.

She said: “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.” She added: “His sexual spirit was not dampened by what happened to him.” She said: “I hope it will go some way towards resetting the narrative around Turing. We think we know this figure and we don’t. There was more to him than is popularly believed.”

She stated that the 2014 film The Imitation Game makes a lot of historical mistakes. “The version of Turing that it presents is a kind of Hollywood lone hero that actually doesn’t resemble what we know about the man himself,” she said. She stated the film depicts Turing as having no sense of humour, being very individualistic, refusing to collaborate, and having antagonistic relationships with other people. “He wasn’t this one-dimensional figure that Hollywood has painted him as,” she said.

Turing was a code breaker during the Second World War. He worked at Bletchley Park breaking the German Enigma code. Some historians believe the work of Turing and others at Bletchley Park shortened the war by as many as four years.

Turing performed postwar work at Manchester University. His postwar work helped open the door for the development of modern computers and artificial intelligence.

Turing died in 1954 at age 41 from cyanide poisoning. A coroner ruled his death a suicide, though some believe it was an accident. The UK government apologised in 2009 for the treatment of Turing.

Sarah Dillon has been a professor at the University of Cambridge since 2010, specializing in 20th-century literature and the intersection of literature and science. In 2019, she published a paper in the Journal of Literature and Science examining the influence of scientific thought on literary narratives. The Review of English Studies, where her analysis of Pryce’s Buoy was published, has a history of publishing posthumous or overlooked works by literary figures.

The 2026 issue of the journal that published her work had a circulation of 3,400 copies. The King’s College, Cambridge archives hold 42 previously unseen documents by Turing, including letters, notes, and handwritten drafts.