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Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Salt Path author Raynor Winn's fourth book delayed
The Salt Path author Raynor Winn's fourth book has been delayed by her publisher. It comes amid claims that the author lied about her story in her hit first book. Winn previously described the claims as "highly misleading" and called suggestions that her husband had Moth made up his illness "utterly vile". In a statement, Penguin Michael Joseph, said it had delayed the publication of Winn's latest book On Winter Hill - which had been set for release 23 October. The publisher said the decision had been made in light of "recent events, in particular intrusive conjecture around Moth's health", which it said had caused "considerable distress" to the author and her family. "It is our priority to support the author at this time," the publisher said. "With this in mind, Penguin Michael Joseph, together with the author, has made the decision to delay the publication of On Winter Hill from this October." A new release date will be announced in due course, the publisher added. Winn's first book, released in 2018, detailed the journey she and husband took along the South West Coast Path - familiarly known as The Salt Path - after they lost their family farm and Moth received a terminal health diagnosis of Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD). But a report in The Observer disputed key aspects of the 2018 "true" story - which was recently turned into a film starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson. Experts 'sceptical of health claims' As part of the article, published last weekend, The Observer claimed to have spoken to experts who were "sceptical" about elements of Moth's terminal diagnosis, such as a "lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them". In the ensuing controversy, PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD, cut ties with the couple. The Observer article also claimed the portrayal of a failed investment in a friend's business wasn't true, but said the couple - whose names are Sally and Tim Walker - lost their home after Raynor Winn embezzled money from her employer and had to borrow to pay it back and avoid police action. Read more from Sky News: It also said that, rather than being homeless, the couple had owned a house in France since 2007. Winn's statement said the dispute with her employer wasn't the reason the couple lost their home - but admitted she may have made "mistakes" while in the job. "For me it was a pressured time," she wrote. "It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry." She admitted being questioned by police but said she wasn't charged. The author also said accusations that Moth lied about having CBD/CBS were false and had "emotionally devastated" him. "I have charted Moth's condition with such a level of honesty, that this is the most unbearable of the allegations," Winn wrote on her website.
Yahoo
10-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Salt Path author Raynor Winn responds to claims she lied about 'true' story
Salt Path author Raynor Winn has said claims she lied about her story are "highly misleading" and called suggestions her husband made up his illness "utterly vile". A report in The Observer disputed key aspects of the hit book, billed as an "inspiring and life-affirming true story" about a couple's coastal trek. Winn released a lengthy statement denying the paper's claims and shared medical letters apparently sent to her husband, Moth, that appear to support a diagnosis for a rare neurological condition, Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD). One letter mentions his prior "CBS [Corticobasal Syndrome] diagnosis", while another concludes he has "an atypical form" of CBD. The author said accusations he lied about having CBD/CBS are false and have "emotionally devastated" him. "I have charted Moth's condition with such a level of honesty, that this is the most unbearable of the allegations," Winn wrote on her website. The Observer claimed to have spoken to experts who were "sceptical" about elements of his story, such as a "lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them". PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD, ended their relationship with the family following The Observer's claims. Winn said she had never suggested walking was "some sort of miracle cure" and that there can be "symptoms for many years before they finally reach a diagnosis". "Even then, many sufferers' symptoms present in an atypical way," she wrote. "They might not present with the same symptoms, occurring in the same order, or with the same severity." Winn also posted the letters on Instagram and said they are grateful Moth's condition is slow-progressing. She clarified it is now commonly referred to by specialists as CBS, "which describes the symptoms observed during life". The bestselling book was also recently released as a film, starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson, charting the couple's 630-mile trek along the Cornish, Devon, and Dorset coast - a journey sparked by the devastation of losing their house. The Observer claimed the portrayal of a failed investment in a friend's business wasn't true, rather they lost their home after Raynor Winn embezzled money from her employer, Martin Hemming, and had to borrow to pay it back and avoid police action. Winn's statement said the dispute with Mr Hemmings wasn't the reason they lost their home - but admitted she may have made "mistakes" while in the job. "For me it was a pressured time," she wrote. "It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry." She admitted being questioned by police but said she wasn't charged. Winn added: "I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties." Read more from Sky News: The author reiterated the book's version of events: that the loss of their home in Wales stemmed from an investment in a friend's property portfolio that went sour. Her statement goes into legal detail about how it transpired and admits - as The Observer suggested - that the couple at one point tried to raffle the house. However, the author said they "quickly realised it was a mistake as it clearly wasn't going to work. We cancelled it and refunded the few participants." The 63-year-old also denied having any outstanding debts and said it was "blatantly untrue" the couple were hiding behind pseudonyms after The Observer quoted people who said they knew them by the surname Walker. "Winn is my maiden name and like most women who have married I've used both my maiden name, Winn, and married name, Walker," said the statement. She also explained she preferred the first name Raynor, rather than her birth name Sally Ann, so took that as her pen name; while Moth is an abbreviation of her husband's name, Timothy. "The legal names we use on our bank records, our utility bills etc. Our friends and neighbours use Sal and Tim interchangeably with Ray and Moth - there is nothing hiding in our names," she said. Sky News has contacted The Observer for a response to Winn's statement. Raynor Winn had been scheduled to make numerous appearances over the summer, performing with Saltlines, her collaboration with Gigspanner Big Band. However, the band has since announced on social media that she will no longer be taking part in the tour. She was also scheduled to take part in various Q&As, conversations, writing courses and festivals.
Sky News
10-07-2025
- Health
- Sky News
Salt Path author Raynor Winn responds to claims she lied about 'true' story
Salt Path author Raynor Winn has said claims she lied about her story are "highly misleading" and called suggestions her husband made up his illness "utterly vile". A report in The Observer disputed key aspects of the hit book, billed as an "inspiring and life-affirming true story" about a couple's coastal trek. Winn released a lengthy statement denying the paper's claims and shared medical letters apparently sent to her husband, Moth, that appear to support a diagnosis for a rare neurological condition, Corticobasal Degeneration (CBD). One letter mentions his prior "CBS [Corticobasal Syndrome] diagnosis", while another concludes he has "an atypical form" of CBD. The author said accusations he lied about having CBD/CBS are false and have "emotionally devastated" him. "I have charted Moth's condition with such a level of honesty, that this is the most unbearable of the allegations," Winn wrote on her website. The Observer claimed to have spoken to experts who were "sceptical" about elements of his story, such as a "lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them". PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD, ended their relationship with the family following The Observer's claims. Winn said she had never suggested walking was "some sort of miracle cure" and that there can be "symptoms for many years before they finally reach a diagnosis". "Even then, many sufferers' symptoms present in an atypical way," she wrote. "They might not present with the same symptoms, occurring in the same order, or with the same severity." Winn also posted the letters on Instagram and said they are grateful Moth's condition is slow-progressing. She clarified it is now commonly referred to by specialists as CBS, "which describes the symptoms observed during life". The bestselling book was also recently released as a film, starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson, charting the couple's 630-mile trek along the Cornish, Devon, and Dorset coast - a journey sparked by the devastation of losing their house. The Observer claimed the portrayal of a failed investment in a friend's business wasn't true, rather they lost their home after Raynor Winn embezzled money from her employer, Martin Hemming, and had to borrow to pay it back and avoid police action. Winn's statement said the dispute with Mr Hemmings wasn't the reason they lost their home - but admitted she may have made "mistakes" while in the job. "For me it was a pressured time," she wrote. "It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business. Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry." She admitted being questioned by police but said she wasn't charged. Winn added: "I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties." The author reiterated the book's version of events: that the loss of their home in Wales stemmed from an investment in a friend's property portfolio that went sour. Her statement goes into legal detail about how it transpired and admits - as The Observer suggested - that the couple at one point tried to raffle the house. However, the author said they "quickly realised it was a mistake as it clearly wasn't going to work. We cancelled it and refunded the few participants." The 63-year-old also denied having any outstanding debts and said it was "blatantly untrue" the couple were hiding behind pseudonyms after The Observer quoted people who said they knew them by the surname Walker. "Winn is my maiden name and like most women who have married I've used both my maiden name, Winn, and married name, Walker," said the statement. She also explained she preferred the first name Raynor, rather than her birth name Sally Ann, so took that as her pen name; while Moth is an abbreviation of her husband's name, Timothy. "The legal names we use on our bank records, our utility bills etc. Our friends and neighbours use Sal and Tim interchangeably with Ray and Moth - there is nothing hiding in our names," she said. Sky News has contacted The Observer for a response to Winn's statement. Raynor Winn had been scheduled to make numerous appearances over the summer, performing with Saltlines, her collaboration with Gigspanner Big Band. However, the band has since announced on social media that she will no longer be taking part in the tour. She was also scheduled to take part in various Q&As, conversations, writing courses and festivals.
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Inside the Salt Path controversy: ‘Scandal has stalked memoir since the genre was invented'
'The Salt Path is an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story,' reads the description of Raynor Winn's bestselling memoir on its publisher Penguin Random House's website. Which is unfortunate wording if accusations made at the weekend turn out to be true: an investigation by the Observer alleged that the 2018 book – which has recently been adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs – is not all that it seems. Winn writes in The Salt Path that she and her husband, Moth, had their home repossessed due to an investment in a friend's company that went on to fail. With nowhere to live, as she tells it, the couple decided to walk the length of the South West Coast Path, wild camping along the way and relying on the kindness of strangers. The Observer piece suggests Winn's account of becoming homeless is untruthful, and reports that she took £64,000 from her former employer. It also questions the legitimacy of Moth's diagnosis with the neurological condition corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a core part of the memoir. Winn's immediate response called the article 'highly misleading', adding: 'We are taking legal advice and won't be making any further comment at this time.' She stood by her book being 'the true story of our journey'. Still, after the report, PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD and formerly worked with Winn and her husband, terminated its relationship with the couple. On Wednesday, Winn published a more detailed statement, defending her book's truthfulness and giving more detail about the events that led to the couple losing their home. She also provided medical letters addressed to her husband in defence of allegations relating to his illness. This is not the first time a much-hyped memoir has come up against accusations of lying. Belgium-born Misha Defonseca's 1997 book about how she was raised by wolves during the second world war turned out to be completely fabricated. Love and Consequences by Margaret B Jones, which was sold on release in 2008 as the true story of the author's experience growing up as a mixed-race foster child in South Central Los Angeles, turned out to have been written by Margaret Seltzer, a white, privately educated woman who grew up with her biological family. Perhaps the most famous instance is James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a 2003 memoir of drug addiction and alcoholism that, after being championed by Oprah Winfrey in 2005, shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for 15 weeks. It was billed as 'brutally honest', but later it came to light that chunks of the book had been made up. Winfrey in particular was furious with Frey, telling him it was difficult to talk to him when he came on her TV show to explain himself in 2006. 'I feel duped,' she said. 'But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.' 'How could they lie?' is a question many readers ask when a memoir they love is proved to be untrue. But there's another question that needs to be answered, too: how could the author get away with it? How did they manage to get their lies past an agent and multiple editors, all the way into a published book labelled as a true story? The short answer is that if someone is lying about their own life, it is often very difficult for others to tell. Dr Pragya Agarwal, the author of books including the 2021 memoir (M)otherhood and a teacher of memoir writing, says that a big part of writing nonfiction 'is about trust between the writer and the reader. I am not really sure how someone's life story can be factchecked in its entirety.' Others say it is not the publisher's role to investigate whether an author is telling the truth or not. Grace Pengelly is a freelance writer and editor who formerly worked as a nonfiction commissioning editor at HarperCollins. An editor's role 'is to help the author craft their story as compellingly and accurately as possible', she says, and that requires believing in the writer. 'Without a certain degree of trust from the outset, it is difficult for an editor and author to work with each other effectively.' That doesn't mean that memoirs are not fact-checked. 'Prior to acquiring a memoir, a publisher would look into the background of the author and their story to see if it checks out,' says Pengelly. Any 'question marks around the veracity of an author's story would definitely be a reason why a publisher wouldn't offer on a book'. But the research undertaken at this stage wouldn't tend to involve checking whether someone was actually incarcerated for as long as they said they were (one of the major falsities in A Million Little Pieces), or whether a couple who claimed to be homeless actually owned a property in the south of France, as was alleged by the Observer regarding Winn and her husband (a property Winn has since described as an 'uninhabitable ruin'). Finding out that kind of information might be possible only if publishers had specific teams dedicated to it. The publishing consultant and editor Katy Loftus, who previously worked for Penguin Random House, says she isn't aware of any publishing houses with a factchecking department. 'Other than top executive salaries, publishing is run on a shoestring. Books make much less money than people think,' she says. The big publishers have legal departments, 'who will give an opinion on something flagged up to them by a commissioning editor, and occasionally do a complete legal read if requested', she adds. But the main factchecking responsibility tends to fall to the commissioning editors, who are 'responsible for hundreds of tasks' – from briefing book cover designers, to negotiating deals with authors, to managing teams of people. The editing itself 'is often at the bottom of the list, and factchecking is only part of the editing process.' Even when it comes to legal checks, the main concern is that a book doesn't contain anything that might lead to the publisher being sued, rather than actually analysing the factual content, says Ian Bloom, a media lawyer who has worked in publishing. 'To some extent, nobody much cares if they've got dates wrong and facts wrong, as long as there's no legal implications.' Bloom suspects that a number of celebrity memoirs in particular contain omissions or embellishments. 'There's no real harm done if they gloss over certain things in their lives,' he says, as long as it's not defamatory to anyone else. Aside from rare exceptions – such as when a group of readers successfully sued Frey's publisher, claiming they were defrauded as they bought his book under the impression that it was true, and were refunded the cover price – publishers do not face serious material repercussions for lies told in memoirs. Reputational damage, meanwhile, is usually put on the author. 'When an author signs a contract with a publisher, there are usually author covenants that include clauses about the truthfulness and integrity of the material to the best of the author's knowledge and belief,' Bloom says. The publisher is then entitled to cancel that author's contract, should a book's veracity be called into question. Of course, authors can get around this by writing 'autobiographical fiction' rather than memoir: books such as the actor Carrie Fisher's Postcards From the Edge, based on her own life but categorised as a novel, or the Booker-winning autofictional novel Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, don't come under fire for being made up, because we all know that's what fiction is. So why didn't authors like Frey turn their stories into novels? Perhaps the books wouldn't have done as well marketed in that way – in a true-crime-obsessed world, we're all familiar with the strength of desire for real stories. 'Autofiction isn't as well-established a genre as memoir,' Pengelly says. 'So marketing teams face discrete challenges in framing and taking these stories to the public. A 'true story' has historically proved easier to build a campaign around.' Once a book is out in the world, any inaccuracies tend to be spotted by journalists or academics – there is no regulator of the publishing industry equivalent to the Independent Press Standards Organisation and Ofcom for the media in the UK. With approximately 200,000 books published annually in the UK alone, 'There's no regulator on Earth who can read them all … it's impossible,' Bloom says. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion So how do we stop fake memoirs from being published? In light of the Salt Path allegations, Pengelly is sure publishers will be considering ways to avoid such a scenario coming up again. 'If a narrative arc seems too neat and tidy to be true, perhaps it's worth considering why, and employing a freelance factchecker to investigate,' she says. The trouble is, neat and tidy narrative arcs are often exactly what many readers – and viewers of film adaptations – want. A memoir Pengelly worked on, Zig-Zag Boy by Tanya Frank, is about a mother coming to terms with her son's experiences of psychosis. That book was a more modest commercial success than The Salt Path, but could it have been more of a hit if Frank had ended it with her son being 'healed', rather than with her accepting his altered state? Quite possibly. Triumph in the face of medical adversity is a seductive concept, as readers of Winn's books will know from their stories of Moth's ability to overcome the symptoms of his illness and undertake long walks. Nic Wilson, whose memoir Land Beneath the Waves is about how the natural world helped her to navigate and accept her chronic illness, is disparaging of the 'nature cure' trope we often see in popular books about health. It creates an unrealistic expectation that the order of events should be 'diagnosis, illness, recovery. And I think readers come to expect that,' she says. Clearly, authors may have something to gain by bowing to such expectations and embellishing or omitting certain facts of their life stories. But they also have the most to lose if lies in their books are exposed: they could have their publishing deal dropped, which might mean having to pay back their advance, and they risk no publisher wanting to be associated with them again. Frey's publisher, Nan Talese, was particularly aggrieved by the way her author's reputation was attacked. Winfrey displayed 'fiercely bad manners – you don't stone someone in public, which is just what she did', she told the Dallas Morning News at the time. 'Scandal has stalked memoir since the genre was invented,' Loftus says – an early example being the 1836 memoir Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a 20-year-old woman's story of life in a Montreal convent, which was vilified as a hoax. 'In practice the publicity rarely does more harm than good to the publisher, whereas an author's life can be left in tatters.' That's not to say that they won't continue to make money: A Million Little Pieces kept selling even in its second iteration, which had passages rewritten and contained a 'note to the reader' addressing its inaccuracies. And whatever happens after the allegations made against Winn, having already sold more than 2m copies of The Salt Path, she has been made rich by this book and its sequels, and will continue to receive royalties for as long as people keep buying them. The fact that there is money to be made – with very few legal repercussions – by telling the most marketable version of a story, rather than the true one, makes it difficult to believe that this controversy will be the last of its kind. After all, no memoir can be completely true. 'Memories are fallible and selective; we always remember half-truths, and the story an author chooses to tell is only ever one story of a particular situation,' Agarwal says. 'But what any reader wants to believe is that the story they have put their faith in is closest to the writer's truth, that they have not been deliberately misled, that they have not been manipulated. This is essential.' Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
New Statesman
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes
Photo by Steve Tanner courtesy of Black Bear The Salt Path has been quite a phenomenon. As soon as it was published in 2018, Raynor Winn's memoir – about how she and her husband, Moth, had overcome the loss of their house and Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurological condition, by walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, with almost no resources – became a huge success. It was well reviewed. Touching interviews with Winn appeared. The book was shortlisted for both the 2018 Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. It won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize for debut authors over 50. With a pastoral cover by printmaker Angela Harding, it soon became a best-seller, topping the Sunday Times lists for months, and turned into a mainstay of independent bookshops. Altogether, some two million copies were sold. Raynor Winn became a 'charity ambassador' to the South West Coast Path, many walkers setting off in emulation of the book. The couple also became fundraisers for the PSPA, a charity raising awareness of CBD and progressive supranuclear palsy. Winn has since published two more similar memoirs of walks in adversity, with her husband continuing to keep his illness at bay – The Wild Silence in 2020, and Landlines in 2022. In May, a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, filmed on the coastal path, found a receptive audience. I was surprised to learn that my own mother and her friends, in their nineties, had made a trip to the cinema for the first time in ages to catch the movie – though they only quite liked it. This story appears to be in doubt, however. Last Sunday's Observer splashed on a devastating exposé of the book and its author by the investigative journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou. She alleged that the couple's real names were Sally and Tim Walker. Far from being the innocent, exploited victims of a business deal that had gone wrong, Sally Walker faced criminal proceedings for allegedly stealing around £64,000 from her employer, then borrowed £100,000 from a relative to pay her way out of the case; the couple then lost their house when the relative's debt was called in and enforced by a court. Far from being completely homeless, the Observer claims, the couple still owned a property, albeit in ruins and beset by debts, in south-west France. Perhaps most damagingly, nine neurologists and researchers specialising in CBD cast doubt on whether Moth, diagnosed in 2013, could possibly be as well as he seems to be, or have had the miraculous improvements described in the memoir. The PSPA promptly broke links with the pair, taking down a video on its website of Moth talking about his condition. In response, Winn told Sky News and the Guardian that the Observer article was 'highly misleading'. Her statement continued: 'We are taking legal advice and won't be making any further comment at this time. The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey.' Its publisher Penguin Books, having called The Salt Path 'an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world', today said that it 'undertook all the necessary due diligence' before the book's release. The film's producers, meanwhile, have said that 'there were no known claims against the book at the time of optioning it or producing and distributing the film and we undertook all necessary due diligence before acquiring the book'. It's the first movie to be directed by the acclaimed theatre producer Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Angels in America, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and the script is by the playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who had previously been given the book for Christmas by her mother. Hélène Louvart, who has worked with directors like Claire Denis and Agnès Varda, is the cinematographer. They may be feeling indignant now. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As for the film itself, Gillian Anderson embraces the indignities of the walk bravely, down to a severely sunburned nose, but she remains distinctly glamorous, even dainty, in suitably natty outfits. In the book, 'Raynor Winn' worries about her weight and frequently remarks that, not being able to wash often, they both smelled so bad that people would swiftly move away from them. These embarrassments have been dropped. Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy, Georgy Zhukov in The Death of Stalin) is solid and sympathetic as Moth, gasping and grunting mightily as he struggles with every ascent and descent, each one seeming beyond his strength. In the book, his pain and disability seem located mainly in a shoulder. In the film, he is alarmingly incapacitated from the off. Gillian Anderson had evidently been so taken by The Salt Path she had attempted to option the book herself prior to being approached by its eventual producers. Before the shoot started, both Anderson and Isaacs spent a day with the Walkers at their home in Cornwall. Isaacs, promoting the film, was effusive about how Moth had been 'incredibly generous about opening himself up to me… I'm madly in love with him. That's the truth.' Gillian Anderson was more cautious about Raynor: 'I was surprised at how guarded she was… It was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness.' If the film-makers feel stung by the allegations against the Winns, all those who have invested in Raynor Winn's tale simply as readers or cinema-goers, or walkers in their wake, will feel similarly. Read now, the memoir does seem implausible, its tone off throughout. Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): 'I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don't let me be left alone, let me die.' This scene was quietly dropped from the film. The explanation of their financial crash and their reduction to a £48-a-week tax credit never made any sense at all, despite the moving exclamations about how 'we lost, lost the case, lost the house, and lost ourselves'. Readers didn't seem to mind, though. Nor did they care that the exalted passages about healing communion with nature were just as unconvincing. 'I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it.' The book ends with Winn saying she had no idea what the future would bring. 'All I knew was that we were lightly salted blackberries hanging in the last of the summer sun, and this perfect moment was the only one we needed.' Being a lightly salted blackberry seems unlikely to suffice now. Comparisons have been made between The Salt Path furore and other controversies over authors' authenticity – but that storytellers often make things up is not surprising. What is more revealing about The Salt Path case is how large and eager an audience it found for its story of pilgrimage, redemption and miraculous healing. Winn is careful to emphasise early in the book that she doesn't 'believe in God, in any higher force', yet this serves only to make her homespun parable of salvation all the more approachable to those with a faith-shaped hole in their lives no longer occupied by the Church of England. The acceptable, overtly fictional version of this story was The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the debut novel of radio dramatist Rachel Joyce, published in 2012, the year before the events described in The Salt Path. In this book, our hero receives a letter from a dying friend in Berwick-upon-Tweed and, though not religious, sets off on foot on a penitential pilgrimage of 627 miles (compared to the 630 claimed by Winn) in the belief that while he keeps walking, she will miraculously stay alive. Sentimental, mildly entertaining and hardly objectionable, it has sold four million copies and been translated into 37 languages. In 2023, it was made into a film starring the unimprovably English Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton. There is a long list of 'inspirational' writers, from Paulo Coelho to L Ron Hubbard, who fabricated the marvels they wrote about. Such is our hunger for inspiration, though, and however potentially dubious a source, that we ask no questions until too late. [See more: Oasis are the greatest Irish band of all time] Related
