Author Raynor Winn published a book under a pseudonym six years before her 2018 memoir The Salt Path, despite repeatedly describing the later work as her debut, it has emerged.

Winn received widespread acclaim for The Salt Path, including a £10,000 prize for debut writers.

According to Winn’s lawyer, the author released the book, How Not to Dal Dy Dir, in 2012 under the alias Izzy Wyn-Thomas. It was published by a company that she and her husband owned and was sold as part of a prize draw to win their home in north Wales. The claims were made in a new BBC Sounds podcast, Secrets of the Salt Path.

“It’s the first thing I’ve written since I was a teenager leaving school – the first thing,” she said of The Salt Path in a 2020 interview with Waterstones. In the same interview, her husband, Moth, was asked if he knew of his wife’s writing abilities. He replied: “No, not at all. Not that she could write. Surprised me.”

And speaking to BBC Radio Cornwall in 2019, she said she had searched online for a literary agent “as you do when you have no connections and no idea what you’re doing”.

The latest claims follow a controversy in which Winn has been accused of fabricating aspects of her memoir. The Salt Path describes Winn’s experience of walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path with Moth, after the couple lost their home in Wales and he was diagnosed with a terminal illness.

An investigation by the Observer presented legal documents and witnesses who alleged that the couple lost their home after Winn took out a private mortgage to repay tens of thousands of pounds she was alleged to have taken from her employer. The same investigation further alleged that Moth had not been diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD).

In response to the Observer’s investigation, Winn called the article “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”, adding that it “seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.

Winn is said to have made millions of pounds from sales of the memoir, events and the film adaptation of The Salt Path, which starred Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. The memoir has sold two million copies and been translated into 25 languages.

In 2019, Winn won the Christopher Bland prize for The Salt Path, an annual award of £10,000 for a debut novelist or nonfiction writer. According to the BBC, the prize did allow entries from writers who had previously self-published the year The Salt Path won, but changed the rules the following year.

The podcast also claims that Winn and her husband set up a publishing company, Gangani Publishing, in March 2012. Companies House records list Tim Walker and Sally Walker – the legal names of Raynor and Moth Winn – as director and shareholder respectively. The company appears to have produced only one title: How Not to Dal Dy Dir. “Dal Dy Dir” is a Welsh nationalist phrase, meaning “stand your ground”.

The online description of the book says it is a “darkly humorous novel that uses the deftest touch to draw a thread through the lives of Welsh farmers, city accountants, Indian hoteliers and Eisteddfod mums”.

Those who bought the book at the time were entered into a prize draw to win what was described as the couple’s friend’s home in Wales, which they said had to be let go due to ill health. The couple advertised the home as a prize “offered free of mortgage or any other legal or registered charge”.

It was later revealed to be the couple’s own property, then facing repossession. Land Registry documents seen by the BBC revealed that the house did have a debt registered against it and a mortgage.

In an online statement about the raffle in July 2025, Winn said: “It was a mistake, as it clearly wasn’t going to work. We cancelled it and refunded the few participants.”

The Guardian has contacted Raynor Winn’s representatives for comment.

My earliest reading memory
Apparently I taught myself to read when I was three via the labels on the Beatles 45s we had: I remember the moment of recognising the words “I” and “Feel” and “Fine”. It took a bit longer to work out the word “Parlophone”.

My favourite book growing up
Sister Vincent taught primary six in St Joseph’s, Inverness, and was a discerning reader with very good taste, plus the kind of literary moral rectitude that meant she removed Enid Blyton from the class library because she believed Blyton’s books were written by a factory of writers. In 1972 she and I had a passionate argument when the class was choosing a book to be read out loud to us and I championed Charlotte’s Web by EB White, with which I was in love. Sister Vincent put her foot down. “No. Because animals speak in it, and in reality animals don’t speak.” I recently reread it for the first time since I was nine, and it moved me to tears. What a fine book, about all sorts of language, injustice, imaginative power and friendship versus life’s tough realities. Terrific. Radiant. Humble.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Liz Lochhead’s Memo for Spring. One evening when I was 16 I babysat for our marvel of an English teacher at Inverness High School, Ann McKay. Raiding her bookshelves I found a book so slim it had no spine, just hinges, and was by a woman who was young, Scottish and a poet (at this point in time a rare combination). The poems in it were so good, gripping and clear, written in a kind of Scottish English I knew was close to my own, but I’d never read in any book. I read it twice through that evening then Ann lent me it for a week. It filled me with excitement and hope.

The writer who changed my mind
See above. Liz Lochhead. She changed what was possible – for so many of us.

The books that made me want to be a writer
Reading certain writers does this for me on a continual basis. Muriel Spark. Toni Morrison. Morrison’s oeuvre is a sustained and courageous masterclass in how the aliveness in writing shifts the energy in life, and Spark’s Loitering with Intent, like all her books, will never fail to send me on my way rejoicing.

The author I reread
A lot of Simone de Beauvoir’s writing came into affordable paperback translation when I was in my very early 20s. Back then I read everything I could get. Recently I’ve loved re-encountering her fiction. I think her novels are outstanding, especially Les Belles Images (1966), a coruscating postwar satire on the performance of happiness. Also, I never stop rereading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book that’ll always remind its readers to stay fluid and adaptable regardless of crazed changing times.

The book I could never read again
Never say never. I promise I’ll try Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette again, just not right now, OK?

The writers I discovered later in life
Vladimir Nabokov. What sheer shining joy. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Where have I been all the years? Henry James. I read The Golden Bowl in the garden one summer not long ago and found myself running down our garden path shouting out loud to my partner: “Sarah! Sarah! The golden bowl is broken!”

The book I am currently reading
Liadan Ní Chuinn, Every One Still Here. These stories about Ireland and recent history face up to the truth of lives in a way that very little new writing I’ve read does. In doing this they change and recharge the potential of the short story form. Two have already become some of my favourite stories ever.

My comfort read
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. A piece of perfection composed of loss, light, clarity and good nature – a book so trim that it fits easily in the pocket of a jacket yet contains much of everything in life that really matters.

It has been one of the films of the summer so far – the tale of Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, who embark on the 630-mile South West Coast Path walk after their house is repossessed and Moth is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

There has been almost universal praise for the life-affirming story of The Salt Path, which has won rave reviews from critics. Until now.

On Sunday, The Observer published an investigation which made a series of claims about the author of the best-selling book on which the film is based.

The report alleged that Winn took tens of thousands from a former employer, and suggests she lied about being made homeless and about the circumstances under which the couple’s house was repossessed in the memoir. It also cast doubt over the legitimacy of Moth’s diagnosis.

Contacted by The Guardian, Winn said the Observer report was “highly misleading”.

“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.”

Raynor Winn – whose real name is Sally Walker, according to the report – took “around £64,000” from an estate agency and property surveyor where she worked as a bookkeeper. Walker was subsequently arrested, said the wife of the business owner.

The Salt Path describes the couple losing their home after investing a “substantial sum” in the business of a childhood friend of Moth – whose real name is Tim Walker, according to the Observer – which subsequently failed. According to Winn, the friend claimed the couple were responsible for company debts, and took them to court, where the judge ordered the repossession of their house.

However, it is claimed the Walkers’ house was in fact repossessed after the couple did not pay back a loan used to cover the money Walker took from the estate agency, according to the investigation. The Walkers borrowed £100,000 from a distant relative of Tim’s, and the loan was secured against their house.

It is alleged that the relative also helped Walker get a solicitor, who approached her former employer, Martin, with the offer that she would pay back the money and cover legal costs. The Observer claimed that Martin also agreed to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and that no criminal charges were pursued against Walker.

Tim’s relative’s business failed, and the Walkers’ house was ultimately repossessed in June 2013. Yet, while Winn depicts the couple as being made “homeless” and having nowhere to go, documents seen by the Observer show that the Walkers bought a house in France in 2007, which they still own.

The investigation also casts scepticism over Moth’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), which he has apparently lived with for 18 years. Michele Hu, a professor of clinical neurosciences at Oxford University named in the report, said that she would be “very sceptical” that it is CBD. “I’ve never looked after anyone that’s lived that long.”

Following The Salt Path, Winn published two further books, The Wild Silence and Landlines. Each of the books opens with Moth suffering from the symptoms of CBD, before the couple go on a difficult walk and Moth’s symptoms seem to improve.

The Salt Path has sold more than two million copies worldwide since its publication in 2018. Last month, a film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs was released in the UK.

“The film is a faithful adaptation of the book that we optioned,” said Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features, the two production companies behind the film. “The allegations made in the Observer relate to the book and are a matter for the author Raynor Winn. 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.”

A fourth book by Winn, On Winter Hill, is scheduled to be released in October. Michael Joseph, the Penguin imprint that publishes Winn’s memoirs, did not comment or respond when asked whether the publication of On Winter Hill would go ahead.

PSPA, a charity which supports people with CBD and had worked with the Winns, has now ended its relationship with the family, according to the BBC. Winn has also withdrawn from the forthcoming Saltlines tour, on which she was scheduled to appear alongside The Gigspanner Big Band at a number of UK venues.

Raynor Winn, the author of The Salt Path, has described enduring some of the “hardest days” of her life as she defended her memoir against allegations that parts of it were fabricated.

The bestselling 2018 book, which was adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, tells how she and her husband, Moth, walked the 630-mile trek along the south-west coast path in the UK after losing their home.

It also recounts how Moth was diagnosed with a neurological condition.

But the Observer newspaper, which said the couple’s legal names are Sally and Timothy Walker, reported last weekend that Winn may have misrepresented the events that led to the couple losing their home and that experts had cast doubt over Moth having corticobasal degeneration (CBD).

On Wednesday, Winn posted clinic letters on Instagram addressed to Timothy Walker, which she said showed that “he is treated for CBD/S and has been for many years”.

She wrote: “The last few days have been some of the hardest of my life. Heartbreaking accusations that Moth has made up his illness have been made, leaving us devastated.”

In a statement on her website, she said that the article was “grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.

Winn, 63, continued: “The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south-west.

“It’s not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope.

“The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility. And I can’t allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.”

In The Salt Path, the couple lose their house due to a bad business investment. But the Observer reported that the couple lost their home after an accusation that Winn had stolen thousands of pounds from her employer.

It also said that it had spoken to medical experts who were sceptical about Moth having CBD, given his lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them.

Winn’s publishing house, Penguin, said it “undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence”, including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read.

It added: “Prior to the Observer inquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book’s content.”

PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), said it had “terminated” its relationship with the couple after the Observer article.

Winn had been scheduled to make numerous appearances this summer, performing with Saltlines, her collaboration with Gigspanner Big Band. However, the band subsequently announced on social media that she will no longer be taking part in the tour.

Penguin, publisher of The Salt Path, is delaying author Raynor Winn’s next book after reporting cast doubt over the truth of the 2018 memoir. The decision was taken to “support the author,” according to a statement.

The Salt Path tells the story of Winn and her husband, Moth, who embark on a 630-mile walk after their house is repossessed and Moth is diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a terminal illness.

Last weekend, the Observer published an investigation alleging that Winn had lied about being made homeless and about the circumstances under which she and her husband lost their home. It also questioned the legitimacy of Moth’s diagnosis.

On Wednesday, Winn published a lengthy response denying many of the allegations, and shared medical letters discussing Moth’s CBD.

In a statement reported by the Bookseller, the publisher said: “Given recent events, in particular intrusive conjecture around Moth’s health condition which has caused considerable distress to Raynor Winn and her family, it is our priority to support the author at this time”.

“With this in mind, Penguin Michael Joseph, together with the author, have made the decision to delay the publication of On Winter Hill from this October. We will announce a new publication date in due course.”

On Winter Hill would be Winn’s fourth book, after Landlines, The Wild Silence and her debut, The Salt Path, which has sold more than 2m copies globally.

On Winter Hill sees Winn undertake the Coast to Coast walk in northern England, this time alone. “Despite 45 years of walking together, setbacks in her husband, Moth’s, health have led him to see his decline as inevitable, which Raynor refuses to accept”, according to the publisher’s description. “Feeling trapped, she is drawn north, like a migratory bird, seeking the peace and hope that walking brings her”.

After last weekend’s allegations, the charity PSPA, which supports people with CBD, ended its relationship with the couple. Winn also withdrew from the planned Saltlines tour, on which she was scheduled to appear alongside the Gigspanner Big Band at a number of UK venues. Refunds have been given to some customers, according to the BBC.

The Observer accused Winn – whose real name is Sally Walker – of taking “around £64,000” from a former employer, among other allegations. In her response, Winn states: “Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.”

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About the author

“‘Trade, not aid’ has become the banner slogan signaling donor fatigue among Western nations. Many nations have turned, instead, to non-reciprocal preferential trade agreements as a vehicle for promoting economic development in poorer countries. But have these agreements really worked? To what extent? And can they be made to work more effectively? Mshomba’s cogent, accessible, and nuanced book offers persuasive answers to these questions.”

—Michael Lofchie, UCLA

“An invaluable survey of the strengths and weaknesses of trade preference programs.While the benefits of these programs are not automatic, Mshomba makes crystal clear that sustained market access to the world’s largest economies, through programs such as GSP and the African Growth and Opportunity Act, can be vital to Africa’s prosperity.”

—Witney Schneidman, Brookings Institution

“Mshomba draws on trade theory, history, and political economy to explain the complex evolution of non-reciprocal trade preferences since the 1960s and their ambiguous impacts on export diversification and economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lucidly written and well documented, this book is a crucial resource for policymakers and scholars alike.”

—Stephen O’Connell, Swarthmore College

“An incisive analysis of how African countries have or have not benefited from non-reciprocal trade arrangements with the European Union, the US, and China. Mshomba shows clearly how, with the right domestic policies, African countries can benefit from these programs. But he also cautions countries against dependence on these arrangements, which are controlled by the preference-giving countries.”

—Taufila Nyamadzabo, former Executive Director of Africa Group 1, World Bank Group

“I am not a biographer, in the usual definition of that term,” Ann Powers writes in her introduction to Travelling, describing herself instead as “a critic, a kind of mapmaker”. Her book follows Joni Mitchell’s trail across eight decades, mapping out not just the artist’s singular musical journey, but her misjudgments, musical and otherwise, in a discursive narrative that is peppered with critical theory and personal self-questioning.

“I had to keep uprooting myself, rejecting any settled stances about who this woman is and why her music is so special,” Powers says of her often interrogative approach. Her authorial presence, often illuminating, but sometimes distracting, is the defining undercurrent throughout, which means some passages have the feel of someone thinking out loud as they grapple with the more problematic aspects of Mitchell’s life and work. Then again, it is her “thorniness”, as Powers approvingly calls it, that also makes the singer an even more compelling subject.

The journey begins unpromisingly with a prelude titled A Note on Naming, in which Powers frets over whether to call her subject “Joni” or “Mitchell”, the former potentially trivialising, the latter too austerely formal. In the end, she decides to alternate between both depending on the context. This kind of fastidiousness is a constant throughout, but thankfully is put to much better use in Powers’s analysis of Mitchell’s songwriting and often startling musical inventiveness.

What emerges from the off is an artist whose creative restlessness was matched by a single-mindedness that was sharpened during her late-60s ascendancy as a female singer-songwriter remaking the rules of a mostly male tradition. As part of Los Angeles’s fabled Laurel Canyon scene, Mitchell was surrounded by male musicians, including David Crosby, Graham Nash and James Taylor, all three of whom fell for her, but could not compete with her dizzying creative momentum. She could be one of the boys when it suited her, but stood apart from them in terms of her precocious talent (and the way in which she nurtured it). Powers compares her to “the proverbial girl in the playground pickup game who cheers on the boys, but then grabs the ball and throws it in a perfect spiral towards the basket”.

Mitchell’s greatest songs, as several of her contemporaries attest, often arrived out of a state of rapt attentiveness that was at odds with the communal creative vibe that held sway in Laurel Canyon’s post-hippy boho zone. The intense creative introspection that produced Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue was a case in point. It was surely honed in the Canadian prairie city of Saskatoon, where she grew up, and where, aged nine, she contacted polio and, for an unnervingly uncertain time, lost the ability to walk.

Powers deftly links her self-willed recovery, which included her “letting herself get lost” in the wide-open spaces near her suburban family home, to the hauntingly symbolic photograph of Mitchell on the inner sleeve of 1976’s Hejira, arguably her most starkly beautiful and ruminative album. In Joel Bernstein’s black and white image, Mitchell skates confidently across a frozen lake in Wisconsin like a large black bird about to take flight on outstretched wings. “The image doesn’t speak of freedom; it speaks of memory,” writes Powers. “Being alone in this space has taken the woman somewhere else, where she’s been before. In this moment, she could be a child.”

Throughout, Powers roams freely and associatively across Mitchell’s life and work, often drawing similarly surprising parallels between the artist’s past and present. As the title suggests, Mitchell’s constant creative journeying was an end in itself, both risky and renewing. It propelled her from her Canadian trad-folk roots to the very centre of LA’s singer-songwriter aristocracy and beyond, to more challenging collaborations with maverick jazz musicians such as the precociously gifted Jaco Pastorius, and the elderly but still irascible Charles Mingus, with whom she worked just before his death.

While Mitchell’s reverence for black jazz musicians was heartfelt, Powers also delves deep into one of her strangest and most wrong-headed acts of would-be homage. In 1976, she assumed a black alter ego, darkening her face, applying a fake moustache and donning a “brightly banded fedora” atop an afro wig. Basing her look on generic pimp-style characters from blaxploitation movies, and calling herself Art Nouveau, she attended music biz parties without any of her friends and fellow musicians seeing through her disguise. The following year, she released Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, appearing on the cover in the same disguise. As Powers points out, such an act of cultural appropriation seems “inconceivable” today and her forensic interrogation of the unfortunate episode, which draws on essays and critiques by contemporary black scholars, makes for uncomfortable reading.

More intriguing still is Powers’s exploration of Mitchell’s long separation and eventual reunion with the daughter she gave up for adoption while still a struggling but steely ambitious folkie. “I know the adoption triad intimately,” writes Powers, describing how she “raised a child born of a woman even younger than Joni was when the baby she named Kelly Dale was born”. It’s that kind of book, shifting often unexpectedly from the critically detached to the deeply personal.

In old age, having recovered from a long, debilitating illness and recently, triumphantly, performed on stage again after a lengthy absence, Mitchell has attained an almost saintly status, particularly among a coterie of young, American, female musicians who rightfully revere her as a role model and creative inspiration. Having celebrated her subject’s all-too-human thorniness, Powers is not entirely comfortable with this late canonisation, not least because the late “swell of adoration” that attends her tentative comeback has tended to obscure her complexity as a human being and an artist.

There is more than a grain of truth underpinning Powers’s refreshingly sceptical refusenik stance, not least because our seemingly insatiable need for this kind of all-pervasive celebratory nostalgia is always somehow diminishing and reductive. In contrast, Powers’s book is a counterweight to the myth of “Joni the unimpeachable treasure that many feel so compelled to protect”. You may not agree with every critical twist and turn that Powers puts herself – and her idol – through, but the end result may well make you reconsider the Joni you think you know.

It is estimated that one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness. These conditions can range in severity and lead to disability. “But hidden within those statistics are the striking disparities that exist in the prevalence, course, and burden of mental illnesses,” said Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Gordon’s remarks opened the “75th Anniversary: Amplifying Voices and Building Bridges: Toward a More Inclusive Future” symposium, which was held at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., and videocast online on March 18, 2024. Part of a year-long celebration featuring a trio of themed symposiums and other events, this symposium focused on inclusion in research, disparities in health and access to care, and diversity in the mental health workforce.

“As an institute, we have much to be proud of, but we also need to reflect on our failures, particularly those related to racism and discrimination,” said Dr. Gordon. “Understanding the past and present will enable us to continue deconstructing systemic racism within biomedical research and pave the way for a brighter future.”

The symposium brought together researchers, those living with mental illness, clinicians, and communities to reflect on opportunities to engage people in mental health research in meaningful and equitable ways. The symposium opened with remarks from NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, M.D., and Gordon, followed by a keynote by Ruth Shim, M.D., M.P.H. , the Luke Grace Kim Professor in Cultural Psychiatry and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Davis.