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‘A storehouse of non-AI human experience’: Author opens online memoir platform for submissions
Novelist and memoirist Richard Beard is launching “the first-ever mass participation online memoir” on 8th September, after beginning the process with his own online memoir published earlier this year.
Now, he is inviting other writers to join him in building the Universal Turing Machine (UTM), which aims to “celebrate authentic, non-AI-generated human experience”.
Beard’s online whole-life memoir – 1,000 words for each year of his life, from 1967 to 2030 – is laid out on-screen in a chessboard format and available to read for free. It can be read in multiple different orders, “mirroring the way we reflect upon our lives and memories, leaping across years and decades”.
The project is intended to become “a unique and uniquely important storehouse of authentic non-AI generated human experience. Everyone can write for the Universal Turing Machine, of any age and from anywhere in the world, on the principle that everyone’s life-story is equally valid,” the description continues. Submission and edited online publication are free. Submissions close on 31st January 2026.
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Richard Beard said: “A memoir is the one book everyone has in them, and the Universal Turing Machine provides a template for how to write it. A chance to preserve a unique voice, your own, and also to discover that voice within a larger project that like life itself allows for chance encounters and coincidences.”
He continued that “the Universal Turing Machine, as it grows memoir upon memoir, is designed to expand our understanding of what memoir can do and to celebrate memory and imagination – human consciousness – through creative writing and reading.”
Monique Roffey, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story (Peepal Tree Press) said of the project: “In a time when creativity is being hacked and stolen from us by bots, Richard Beard has clapped back with this fully human, creatively driven writing project which aims to connect us all across time. Richard Beard again plays trickster and genie as a writer, but this time invites us all to join in.”
Richard Beard’s six novels include Lazarus Is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His narrative non-fiction includes his memoir The Day That Went Missing, which was a US National Book Critics Circle finalist and winner of the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography.
Beard is published in the UK by Vintage.
