How a book forger fooled the literary world until his audacious ruse was rumbled
Controversy in the book world, like the debate around the veracity of The Salt Path, is nothing new. Excerpts from Konrad Kujau's faked Hitler Diaries were published through various outlets in the 1980s before their provenance was debunked.
Earlier attempts at bamboozlement by bibliopegists, as mentioned by Joseph Hone, include 'Major Byron' claiming to be the poet's son in order to hawk bogus letters and William Henry Ireland's attempts at passing off his own substandard scribbling as undiscovered Shakespeare.
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Irish Independent
3 days ago
- Irish Independent
How a book forger fooled the literary world until his audacious ruse was rumbled
History Controversy in the book world, like the debate around the veracity of The Salt Path, is nothing new. Excerpts from Konrad Kujau's faked Hitler Diaries were published through various outlets in the 1980s before their provenance was debunked. Earlier attempts at bamboozlement by bibliopegists, as mentioned by Joseph Hone, include 'Major Byron' claiming to be the poet's son in order to hawk bogus letters and William Henry Ireland's attempts at passing off his own substandard scribbling as undiscovered Shakespeare.
Irish Examiner
25-07-2025
- Irish Examiner
Karl Whitney: On true stories: If reality is a show, then we want our narrator to win
Consider the things that happen in our lives: Messy and often incoherent incidents best understood in the rearview mirror, if we can understand them at all. Then consider what we read about life, how it's presented to us in books. As readers, we're used to consuming other people's lives as if they're lessons in how to live: How to deal with adversity and how to overcome it. Things might go badly in our own lives, but we're fundamentally optimistic, so we want true stories that conform to that worldview. If reality is a show, then we want our narrator to win. And the publishing industry supplies those tales. The tragedy-to-triumph structure that such books conform to only tangentially resemble the reality we inhabit. A recent Observer article investigated Raynor Winn, the author of the hit memoir The Salt Path, and cast doubt on the twin inciting incidents of the book: Her husband's illness and the circumstances of their debt and subsequent loss of their house. Outcry ensued. There is how you remember things and there are the facts. Some facts can't be established except through memory — for example, how you felt at a certain time and place — and depend on a certain literary artfulness. Then there are others you can verify simply by looking at your bank records, checking your old messages or emails, or consulting your diary. What about the fact-checking process? Commentators have asked this question in relation to the Winn book. The truth is that much of what's published doesn't undergo the forensic examination by an editor that we might like to imagine. Partly this is related to the economics of publishing: There are fewer people, each carrying out a vast array of tasks, resulting in less time to do the kind of in-depth editing that can smoke out factually inaccurate material. Many of the factual mistakes in books might be honest mistakes, but that doesn't make them any truer. The other side of it is that nobody wants to question a good story, not even book publishers. Writer Raynor Winn, husband Moth, and dog Monty. A recent 'Observer' article investigated Winn and cast doubt on the twin inciting incidents of the book: Her husband's illness and the circumstances of their debt and subsequent loss of their house. Picture: Ben Russell Consider this process: A book proposal is sent to an editor. The proposal is circulated to others at the publisher and, at a weekly editorial meeting, everyone — other editors, the marketing department, the publicity department — get behind it. It gathers a momentum within the publishing house that's unstoppable. They think of it as a surefire hit and plough their resources into it to give it the best chance of achieving bestselling status. (It gets increasingly difficult as the momentum builds to suggest that some of the facts might be suspect.) One key reason for getting behind it is that the author can more easily generate publicity because the book is about his or her life — they've lived it and can speak with authority in the media about it. The narrative arc of the book is their own personal arc. The author can do interviews on This Morning or The One Show, talking about their triumph over adversity. Excerpts of the book can be serialised in magazines. Effectively, the author is the book and the book is the author: The gap between life and the written word has been closed. Fine, unless that means you must live a lie. The public — whether they've read the book or not — invest in the author's struggle and ultimate triumph, in which they can play a part by buying the book and helping the author to achieve financially secure, even millionaire, status. We're participating in this process as consumers, playing a small part in the rise of a figure who we identify with. Inevitably, we feel betrayed when what we believed to be a true story is just, well, a story that seemed to resemble the truth. The rise of the reality TV show over the last three decades has opened a dark portal to celebrity for ordinary people. Such shows construct situations in the attempt to reveal the essential character of the participants: Those who are rewarded invariably reveal some kind of authenticity in spite of the falsity of the construct. It seems like we've absorbed so much of the reality form that it has become difficult to separate the true from the false anymore. We're used to taking others' stories at face value without probing too deeply. The prevalence of social media presents the possibility of curating selves that might only be tangentially related to the reality of our lives. If someone tells us a tall tale in the street we might be a bit sceptical, but if they spout it on social media, or on a podcast, we might take it as fact. This is mass media with little to no editorial intervention, yet still carries the weight of authority no matter how much we hear about 'fake news'. Books reflect this augmented reality, and we — no matter how much we believe ourselves to be above gullibility — can embrace it without question. We don't have to believe everything we read; a healthy scepticism keeps us sharp and, indeed, ensures we remain good readers of books and even life. (One of the reasons for the current decline in non-fiction book sales, I've heard, is the rise of podcasts which allegedly fulfil the same function for many people as sitting down to read about a topic. I don't wish to tar all podcasts with the same brush, but I've heard more bullshit facts from people whose source is invariably a podcast — one helmed by a minor celebrity who might have skimmed Wikipedia — than I've heard from people who've read about the same subject in a book.) There's life in a book. Writers can let current and future readers know about what it was like to live and think in the world in a certain place at a certain time. I'm not a huge fan of the self-help genre but, as I've got older, I've begun to acknowledge that honest communication — be it in life or in art — can have a useful, even therapeutic, effect. That doesn't mean that the book has to be a confessional account of the emotional life of the author, but rather that it has a ring of plausibility and truth about it. I look for a relationship between life and the page that's not necessarily direct transcription, but rather reflects an author's close examination of the events and feelings that they or their subjects have experienced in life. Something that tells the reader in a relatively unvarnished way what it was like to be alive. Exaggeration and embellishment aren't compatible with such an approach. I think that's the central betrayal when a work of non-fiction becomes economical with the truth. There's a balance to be struck between artfulness and factuality, and that's one of the key challenges of writing non-fiction. There's a meretriciousness to flashy but empty writing: We emerge from the experience of reading it dazzled but unedified. In non-fiction writing, the memoir form is sadly compatible with making a writer a brand, and becoming a brand might seem a commercial blessing but, in my estimation, can be an artistic curse. If that writer is sloppy, cynical or, let's face it, a complete fantasist — and if we choose to believe them — then it's bad news for everyone. Read More Author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path accused of lying
The Journal
13-07-2025
- The Journal
Sitdown Sunday: She turned her life story into a bestselling memoir - but was it all a lie?
IT'S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair. We've hand-picked some of the week's best reads for you to savour. 1. The real Salt Path Gillian Anderson, who plays Raynor Winn in the film adaptation of The Salt Path, stands beside the author at the premiere in Munich. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo Raynor Winn's The Salt Path, telling her unbelievable life story, sold millions of copies worldwide and was adapted into a blockbuster film. When a newspaper decided to investigate her tales, they uncovered a scandal. ( The Observer , approx 19 mins reading time) Winn has since written two sequels and has a lucrative publishing deal with Penguin to produce at least one more. Five weeks ago The Salt Path reached new audiences when it was released in the UK as a film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and Winn is a co-producer. Standing proudly on the red carpet outside the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay, Raynor, 60, told TV cameras at the film's UK premiere that the experience was 'almost unbelievable'. In that moment, she and Moth seemed like the ultimate examples of British grit and perseverance. Back in Wales, Hemmings saw a very different picture. Because she knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn't her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief. 2. Something in the water Notorious serial killers Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Gary Ridgway all lived in Tacoma in the 1960s. A new book examines whether lead pollution played a role in their crimes. ( The New Yorker , approx 15 mins reading time) Fraser thinks the master key is to be found in the fact that these serial killers disproportionately originated in the counties and milieu of her childhood. The area south and southwest of Seattle was home to massive ore-processing facilities, and she, her classmates, and her subjects were reared in their murky, particulate shadows. 'Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,' she writes of her crazy wall, 'those insidious killers, shades of Hades.' The smelters caused a profusion of heavy metals in the region's air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of Tacoma's postwar children. Some were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. Bundy was the most famous figure in 'a long line of outlandishly wanton necrophiliac killers who've lived, at one time or another, within the Tacoma smelter plume.' Fraser waxes in a self-consciously Lynchian register, with stygian and hallucinatory descriptions of the Pacific Northwest. In Tacoma, she writes, it was 'as if someone had scratched through to the underworld and released a savage wave of sulfur.' 3. The Initial Teaching Alphabet Advertisement A 1966 Ladybird ITA (Initial Teaching Alphabet) book titled 'The Poleesman'. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo A generation of UK schoolchildren were left unable to read and write after being taught an alternative alphabet in an experiment to boost reading skills. ( The Guardian , approx 12 mins reading time) My mum grew up in Blackburn in the 1960s, a bright child who skipped a year and started secondary school early. She doesn't remember the details of how ITA was introduced. 'That's just what we were taught,' she tells me. 'I didn't know there was another way, or that I was going to graduate on to something else. 'I'm nearly 60, and poor spelling has dogged me my whole life,' she continues. 'Teachers always used to make jokes about my spelling, and I'd get those dreaded red rings around my work.' English was always her favourite subject, but it quickly became a source of shame. 'I remember that absolute dread of reading in front of the class, stumbling on words. And then, at A-level, I'll never forget my English teacher said to me, 'You'll never get an A because of your spelling.' That was crushing. English was the one subject I loved – I felt so aggrieved.' 4. Using AI to humiliate women A whistleblower has revealed details of how lucrative it is to run an app that uses AI to create fake nude images of women for millions of users. ( Der Spiegel , approx 14 mins reading time) Nudify apps are not hidden in obscure forums or on pornography platforms, rather they are freely available on the internet. The only limitation: Many of these services only work with women's bodies. The AI programs they use have apparently never been trained to produce naked pictures of men. Images of women in underwear are usually free, with faked photos of subjects in typical pornographic poses available for a price of just a few euros. Clothoff is one of the leading apps on the market. In just the first six months of 2024, the website received 27 million visitors, with an average of 200,000 pictures being produced by the program each day, according to the company. Thousands of women have likely become victims of the app. 5. RMS Empress of Ireland People aboard the RMS Empress of Ireland at the Liverpool harbour in 1914. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo The ship sank two years after the Titanic and had an even higher passenger death toll. In this piece, Eve Lazurus recounts the tragedy and examines the story of Gordon Charles Davidson, who reportedly swam over six kilometres and managed to survive. ( The Walrus , approx 10 mins reading time) The Storstad was on its way to Montreal, carrying more than 10,000 tons of coal. She had a reinforced hull that could slice through winter ice, and at that moment, she was headed to Father Point to collect a pilot who would navigate the ship up the St. Lawrence. Her sharp prow ripped through the Empress 's steel plates and cabins, tearing a 32.5-square-metre hole in the ship's starboard side, well below the waterline. More than 200,000 litres of water a second poured into the Empress, causing catastrophic flooding in the engine rooms and lower decks. The furnaces flooded. The power went out. The ship was thrown into darkness before most of the sleeping passengers could even grasp what was happening. Those who had managed to leave their cabins were left groping around in the pitch dark, trying to find a way out, clawing their way up the tilting stairs. Because they had boarded the ship mere hours earlier, they were unfamiliar with the ship's layout. In just thirty seconds, the Empress had taken on almost half her own weight in water. After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water. 6. The secret lives of icons From staying with Marlon Brando on his private island in Tahiti to touring with Dolly Parton and spending days with Al Pacino, Lawrence Grobel interviewed some of the most famous stars on Earth. From his diary, this is a glimpse of their candid conversations. Related Reads Sitdown Sunday: Virginia Giuffre's family share what happened in her final days Sitdown Sunday: The disappearance of a Texas student, and the online sleuths trying to solve it Sitdown Sunday: 'How many?' The mysterious heist of 280,000 eggs from the US's biggest producer ( Vanity Fair , approx 40 mins reading time) Took three days before Marlon agreed to let me turn on the tape recorder. I'd ask, 'Feel like working?' He'd answer, 'No, not really.' So, we sat and stared at the bay and talked, off the record. He'd say, 'It's all very elemental here: the sea, the sky, the crabs, the wind. If the mermaids don't sing for me here, they never will.' I joked, 'Yeah, this is the life, Marl, just sitting here in silence, in the elemental wonder of it all.' When I mentioned acting, he'd say, 'Acting bores me.' And I said, 'I know, but if I was talking to Heifetz, I'd be asking him about music, and if I was with Mickey Mantle, I'd talk to him about baseball.' And he'd respond, 'If you were with William O. Douglas, would you ask him what Marilyn Monroe thought of him?' And on it went. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, went night sailing, walked on the beach, sat on the pier under a strong moon, played chess until 1 a.m., and somehow managed to tape 15 hours of conversation that I'll transcribe myself because he spoke very softly. Not as psychological as Streisand or as playful as Parton, but it's Brando. Witty, funny, serious, and memorable. Took 68 pages of notes that I'll add to this journal. …AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES… Two men guard the gate to the farm near Zanesville, Ohio on 4 May 2012. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo The riveting but grim 2012 longread about Terry Thompson, an Ohio man who had dozens of exotic animals on his farm, and the night he let them all free. ( GQ , approx 56 mins reading time) A little before five o'clock on the evening of October 18, 2011, as the day began to ebb away, a retired schoolteacher named Sam Kopchak left the home he shared with his 84-year-old mother and headed into the paddock behind their house to attend to the horse he'd bought nine days earlier. Red, a half-Arabian pinto, was acting skittish and had moved toward the far corner of the field. On the other side of the flimsy fence separating them from his neighbor Terry Thompson's property, Kopchak noticed that Thompson's horses seemed even more agitated. They were circling, and in the center of their troubled orbit there was some kind of dark shape. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear. Kopchak wasn't overly alarmed by this sight, unexpected as it was, maybe because the bear wasn't too big as black bears go, and maybe because it was running away from him. He knew what he'd do: put Red in the barn, go back to the house, report what he'd seen. This plan soon had to be revised. He and Red had taken only a few steps toward the barn when Kopchak saw something else, close by, just ahead of them on the other side of the fence. Just sitting there on the ground, facing their way. A fully grown male African lion. Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. 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