What the Salt Path fiasco tells us about publishing

Times

11-07-2025

The Salt Path became a publishing sensation in large part because it was written and marketed as a true story. Its publisher, Penguin Random House (PRH), called it 'unflinchingly honest'. The public has long had a taste for so-called misery memoirs, uplifting triumph-over-tragedy tales whose impact relies on the understanding that the events described actually happened. Publishers are well aware that truth sells, just as film-makers love to put 'based on a true story' under a title.
Sterling investigative journalism by The Observer reveals that essential parts of the book were, in fact, invented by its author, Raynor Winn. This applies especially to those passages designed to elicit sympathy for Winn and her husband, Moth. Had readers suspected they were made homeless as a result of alleged embezzlement, and not because of a hard-hearted friend calling in a loan, not many are likely to have been so gripped by the couple's ­redemptive walk along the coast of southwest England. The couple also owned land in France. Readers were conned. Raynor Winn has become a rich woman on the back of deceit.
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Many neurosurgeons have also cast doubt on Moth Winn's corticobasal degeneration diagnosis, a disease which cannot be cured by walking, however long the walk. Despite Mr Winn's health continuing to hold up for an unusually long time, PRH seems to have remained resolutely incurious about details in the book. The publisher's claim that it 'undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence' is clearly open to doubt. PRH's plea that it signed a warranty contract with the author at the time concerning 'factual accuracy' is meaningless if it neglected to make checks.
It seems that, as with the fraudulent Belle Gibson's cookbook that claimed to cure a cancer she did not have, PRH neglected its duty to dig deeper. In doing so it purveyed fiction as fact.