David Blake Knox writes: A literary storm raged during this summer. The eye of that storm could be found in the UK, but it concerned a book that has been an international multi-million bestseller. The book provided the basis of a movie that was released to critical acclaim earlier this year – with the promise of Oscar nominations for both its director and its stars. The Salt Path is a memoir written by Raynor Winn about an epic journey made by herself and her husband, Moth, across the south-west coast of England. The real names of this couple are Sally and Tim Walker, and Winn’s decision to adopt a nom de plume is not the only unusual feature of her book.
I met the author and her husband briefly in 2019 when she received the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Literary Prize. Chris was a relation of mine who had died the previous year – not long after his first novel had been published. Six books had been nominated in 2019 for the prize named after him: four were novels and two were classified as non-fiction. One of the non-fiction books was A Spy Called Orphan, an account of espionage during World War Two; the other was The Salt Path.
In her memoir, Raynor Winn told an inspiring story involving herself and her husband, Moth. Her book related how, due to a series of financial misfortunes, they had been forced to sell their beloved ‘forever home’ – a seventeenth century farmhouse in Wales. They had experienced financial ruin and were left homeless. To make matters much worse, Moth had also been diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration – an incurable and terminal illness. With little left to lose, Raynor and Moth chose to walk 630 miles along the coastal path that would lead them from Somerset – through Devon and Cornwall – to their final destination in Dorset. Their decision to embark on such an ambitious and demanding project seemed like an act of heroic defiance in the face of so much cruel adversity.
Since they had almost no financial resources, Raynor and Moth’s provisions of food and shelter were minimal and largely consisted of what they could carry on their backs. The book recounted their progress as they slowly made their way through the English countryside and a landscape of towering cliffs, heaving seas and vast expanses of sky. Their passage though rural England was not only a physical journey: according to Raynor’s account, it also brought a sense of internal discovery and an emotional re-connection with each other.
Although there were some strong contenders on the night of the award ceremony, it seemed fairly obvious to me that The Salt Path would win the literary prize. Winn’s book had already received a rapturous reception in the UK press. The Sunday Times reviewer described it as ‘magical … a tale of triumph; of hope over despair; of love over everything’. The Guardian considered it ‘a beautiful, thoughtful, lyrical story of homelessness, human strength and endurance’. According to The Independent, the book was ‘an astonishing narrative of two people dragging themselves from the depths of despair along some of the most dramatic landscapes in the country, looking for a solution to their problems and ultimately finding themselves’.
Readers were equally enthusiastic. One wrote: ‘the details of their daily life made it feel like I was living it with them’. Another said: ‘It felt like I became part of their lives and experienced it all!’ while a further enthusiast expressed an opinion that – in the light of subsequent events – would seem all too pertinent: ‘This book is written with so much honesty and dignity, it’s hard to believe that it is a true story.’
It was no surprise to me when The Salt Path won the £10,000 prize at the ceremony that night in 2019. It seemed appropriate that the chair of the adjudicating panel was Gillian Slovo – not only an accomplished writer, but the daughter of the anti-paartheid activist Ruth First, who wrote her own powerful memoir shortly before she was assassinated by a South African policeman.
Winn’s memoir had already been short-listed for the Costa Biography Award and the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing and it soon became an international bestseller, with more than two million copies sold worldwide. Its success led Raynor Winn to write two more bestselling books: The Wild Silence and Landlines. According to the Times reviewer, The Wild Silence made ‘you feel that the world is a better place because Raynor and Moth are in it’. Raynor’s next book, Landlines, was described in The Guardian as ‘another heartwarming Odyssey’. A fourth book, On Winter Hill. was due to be published in October of this year. A press release informed the public that Raynor ‘has laced up her walking boots once more’ for another epic trek – this time a coast-to-coast journey across mainland Britain. However, the publication date of that book has been delayed by the publishers because Winn and her husband are now experiencing ‘considerable distress’.
That distress was triggered by an article which appeared in the Observer newspaper at the beginning of July. Chloe Hajimatheou, the journalist who wrote the article, raised serious questions about some of the claims that Winn had made in The Salt Path. The Observer article alleged that the ‘blockbuster book’ was, in reality, a fantasy that had been ‘spun from lies, deceit and desperation’.
Hajimatheou alleged that some of the key parts of Winn’s ‘true’ story had been fabricated by the author. In The Salt Path, Winn had blamed the repossession of their home in Wales on a friend who had persuaded them to make a bad business investment. According to the Observer article, the financial crisis was actually caused by Winn’s alleged theft of more than £60,000 from her previous employer and her difficulties in repaying the stolen money. It was alleged that she had falsified a number of events and had misrepresented the reasons that had led to the loss of their home.
The Observer article also raised some fundamental questions about the precise nature of Moth’s illness. The average life expectancy of someone diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration is normally reckoned as between six and eight years. By 2025, Moth had survived for over twelve years. When Raynor published Landlines in 2022, she claimed that a neurologist had told her that Moth’s brain scan showed that he had apparently made a remarkable recovery.
Winn had written: ‘After 200 miles of walking over endless headlands … Moth’s health began to improve in ways that should have been impossible. His gait became almost normal, his thoughts cleared, his short-term memory sharpened and movements that had been almost impossible before became easy.’ However, the Observer reported that the degenerative brain condition which Winn had described in The Salt Path was regarded by the medical experts they had consulted as incurable. The notion that this terminal condition could be reversed by strenuous exercise – such as taking very long walks – was considered to lack any medical credibility.
In a follow-up article in a subsequent edition of the Observer, Chloe Hajimatheou has questioned more of the accounts given by Winn of the events and individuals that she and Moth had claimed to have encountered in the course of their journey. Hajimatheou claims that these accounts contain ‘serious distortions’ that expose Winn as an ‘unreliable narrator’. An Australian couple, whom Winn had described meeting in her book, have disputed her account of their meeting and have provided evidence which establishes that they only met Winn several years after the date and in different circumstances to those she had claimed in her book. Hajimatheou believes that there is an underlying pattern followed by Winn in her memoir: one that works consistently to portray her as a victim of circumstance and serves to hide the criminal allegations that were made against her.
Memoirs are, by definition, a highly subjective form of writing and their authors should not be held to account in the same way as those who claim to provide objective and reliable factual information or historical analyses. A memoir is not an autobiography that aims to record most of the important events and details of an individual’s life. Instead, it focuses on some of the dominant themes of that life which it seeks to combine in a compelling and coherent narrative. Yet an intrinsic part of the currency and appeal of the genre is its authenticity. This entails a degree of trust that the reader can place in the author’s commitment to presenting the truth – or, at least, to do so to the best of their ability. Since memoirs depend for their impact on this degree of trust from their readers, there should be no suspicion that the author is being dishonest in what they have written. It seems doubtful, to say the least, that Winn’s memoir would have had the same profound effect on so many of its readers if they had not believed it to be true.
The Salt Path is not, of course, the first memoir to seem at odds with events as they occurred in real life. In one recent scandal, Laura Albert wrote a series of memoirs under the assumed identity of JT LeRoy. These books claimed to tell the story of LeRoy’s drug abuse, transgenderism, and harrowing experiences as a sex worker who was HIV positive. Laura Albert was not HIV positive, transgender or a former sex worker. At first, she communicated in the persona of LeRoy primarily through emails. Later, she used her sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, to play the part of LeRoy, making sure that Knoop was always heavily disguised and never spoke in public. For several years, this charade was celebrated as authentic by both literary reviewers and a host of Hollywood celebrities. After it was exposed as a fraud, Knoop wrote her own book, Boy Girl Boy, which was also a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a feature film that starred Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart.
Then there was Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments, a chilling account of the years that he claimed to have spent as a child in a Nazi death camp. His memoir was published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The prestigious Kirkus Reviews hailed Fragments as ‘Beautifully written, with an indelible impact that makes this a book that is not read but experienced … a masterpiece.’ The book was translated into nine languages and earned widespread critical praise. Wilkomirski was celebrated in BBC and CBS television profiles and featured in admiring articles in Granta and The New Yorker. He was interviewed and videotaped by several reputable archives and was treated as an expert and a primary source of testimony about the Holocaust. Fragments also won several literary prizes – including the USA’s National Jewish Book Award and the Prix Mémoire de la Shoah in France. However, after the book was released, it emerged that Wilkomirski was not Jewish at all. His real name was Bruno Dössekker and he had never spent any time in a concentration camp. His memoir may have been well-written, but it represented a simple and unbridled fantasy. According to one critic, ‘Once the professed relationship between the narrator and historical reality was proved to be palpably false, what was a masterpiece quickly and simply became Kitsch.’
Perhaps the most notorious instance of such literary fraud in recent years was A Million Little Pieces – an apparent memoir by James Frey that purported to tell the authentic life story of a young alcoholic and drug addict and the time he had spent in a rehabilitation clinic. In September of 2005, the author appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s popular TV show when his memoir was chosen to be her Book Club selection. Soon after that, it became the number one non-fiction book on Amazon.com and it topped the New York Times list of bestsellers for fifteen successive weeks. However, from an early stage, doubts about the veracity of the book began to emerge. When Frey appeared for a second time on Oprah Winfrey’s show, he claimed that the same ‘demons’ that had turned him into an alcoholic and drug addict had also driven him to invent and fabricate certain sections of his book.
Frey told Winfrey that he had originally submitted his manuscript as a novel to Random House – but the publisher had rejected his submission. It was only when he resubmitted it as a memoir that it was accepted by Random. This admission by Frey raises serious questions about the responsibilities of publishers to practise due diligence before releasing books that they intend to market as both truthful and accurate accounts. In this case, Oprah Winfrey did not accept Frey’s explanation or his apology. Instead, she told him that she believed he had ‘betrayed millions of readers’. If anything, the sense of betrayal by those who admired The Salt Path appears to be even more intense.
It is not difficult to find reasons for those who loved Winn’s book to feel that they have been deceived and manipulated both by Winn and by her publisher. In particular, the book made an strong emotional impact on some of those suffering from life-threatening illnesses and on their families and friends. For some of these, The Salt Path offered a sense of hope that the grim future before them was not fixed and unalterable. Any lack of factual integrity in Winn’s memoir could be particularly hurtful and demoralising for those in the acute stages of illness. The notion that such people could cure themselves of chronic disease through their own volition can help to promote bogus forms of treatment. It may even lead some of those who are unable to heal themselves through their own efforts to feel that they are somehow to blame for their illness. That is the context in which PSPA, the charity that supports people with corticobasal degeneration, decided to ‘terminate’ its relationship with Winn and her husband.
There are other crucial factors at work in Winn’s memoir: these include the role played in her book by Nature – and her apparent belief in its restorative and therapeutic powers. That has been a recurrent theme in a number of popular memoirs published in recent years, including bestsellers such as Wild by Cheryl Strayed and The Outrun by Amy Liptrot. These and other memoirs suggest that ‘getting back’ to Nature has allowed their authors to recover from severe and traumatic events in their lives. The causes of those traumas may differ – from serious illness to family bereavement to drug addiction – but such memoirs also have certain features in common. Above all, they tend to treat Nature as a place where human beings can find both physical healing and emotional sustenance, and where those values that are often of prime importance to men and women may be recovered and restored.
Such memoirs have attracted large numbers of highly receptive readers and half-a-dozen of them have – like The Salt Path – been developed into feature films. For obvious reasons, these books have also proved of great commercial interest and value to their publishers. However, the Nature that Raynor Winn and similar authors have encountered is not of the ‘red in tooth and claw’ variety in which physical survival is the constant and over-riding goal. Instead, Winn’s memoir is essentially part of a European literary tradition that has evolved over many centuries: in that respect, her book expresses a version of Europe’s pastoral legacy whose roots can be traced back to Ancient Greece.
The Salt Path also has a specifically English dimension. The route that is walked by the Winns takes them far away from the great urban centres of England. Instead, the path they chose leads them – and their readers – towards a romantic vision of that country: a mythical ‘Albion’ whose beauty and integrity have managed to survive the confusion and detritus of modern life. Nature can be understood from this perspective to embody some essential and universal truths that may be revealed to those who seek them out. This has been described by one critic as ‘a kind of cosy bedtime story for the adults of middle England …’
Viewed in that context, Raynor and Moth might even be considered as contemporary pilgrims who not only sought physical well-being but were in pursuit of some form of internal or spiritual enlightenment. Indeed that is just how they were portrayed by one excited critic of The Salt Path who wrote: ‘This is not a postcard journey. It is the slow, real-time geography of presence. To walk such a path is to be transformed … Moth and Raynor become part of the landscape, their bodies broken down and remade by the terrain …’ Just as the practice of ‘wild swimming’ can seem to ground and comfort city-dwellers, the notion of ‘wild walking’ can hold out the promise of a deeper and mystical communion with natural forces. Such communion may be of particular appeal to those who live in urban environments and feel that they have grown out of touch with the primeval world.
It may, perhaps, be too easy simply to accuse Raynor Winn of bad faith in the stories that she has told. Those stories were embraced with uncritical enthusiasm by very many people for one basic reason: they wanted to believe they were true – a common feature of many types of scam. The images of nature that Winn projects in her book may be awe-inspiring – but they are not threatening. Instead, they present a view of Nature as a source of support and succour: almost – but not quite – tamed yet still retaining some sense of danger or edge. Winn’s readers were clearly willing to buy into the kind of quasi-spiritual fantasy that was on offer – and that included literary critics and reviewers as well as members of the public.
4/12/2025
