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The Advertiser
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Is it ever okay for a memoir to stray from the truth?
Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring. Raynor Winn, author of bestselling memoir The Salt Path - also a film starring Gillian Anderson - has been accused of deception in her story of hardship and healing. In Winn's account, after their "forever home" is dispossessed, she and her partner, Moth (who faces a terminal diagnosis) decide to walk the famous 630-mile South West Coast Path along the dramatic cliffs of south-west England. This week, an Observer investigation cast doubt over key aspects of Winn's memoir, which has sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide. Her response? A statement through her lawyer that raises enduring questions about what it means to claim a story is the "truth": "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." Publisher Penguin Michael Joseph told The Bookseller it "undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence" and that "prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content". Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features told the UK's Sky News their film was a "faithful adaptation" of a book. In the book, Winn claims she and her husband lost their home in North Wales after making a bad investment in a friend's business, leaving them liable for debts when it folded. The Observer report claims they lost the house after Winn defrauded her employer of about £64,000, then borrowed £100,000 (with 18 per cent interest) from a distant relative, secured against their house, to repay the money. The couple's house was reportedly repossessed after they were sued to recover the money owed. While in the book they wrote they had nowhere to go, the Observer reports that the couple "owned land in France on which they had previously stayed". The report also raised serious doubts about Moth's terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in the same family as Parkinson's disease. He has been living with it for 18 years, "with no visibly acute symptoms", according to the Observer, but it usually has a life expectancy of around six to eight years and the specialists the publication spoke to were "sceptical". While they still make headlines, do these scandals around fabrication have the same impact they once did, in today's era of "fake news"? And what is "truth" in memoir anyway? Of course, we've been here before - most infamously, perhaps, 20 years ago with James Frey, 1990s poster boy for literary pork pies. In 2005, key claims in his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were debunked by website The Smoking Gun, which posts legal documents, arrest records and police mugshots. Frey's US publisher, Random House, was sued by a group of readers for breach of contract and fraud. The publisher offered refunds to any reader with a receipt for buying the book. Culturally, Frey suffered a blow worse than anything financial: he was cancelled by Oprah. In last month's interview, Frey indignantly argued his book was "85 per cent true [...] as most memoirs are". His main retort, though, was more philosophical: "When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it invalid?" Is a true story akin to the facts? What does it matter, and to whom? In the case of A Million Little Pieces, the question was interrogated legally. To call something memoir is to make a contract with the reader around facts - and this was breached. In the case of The Salt Path, that process is still unfolding. But how exactly do we cordon off facts from embellishments? Is fact strictly tied to the observable: times, places, names, events, chronologies? Can something be true but not factual? What about feelings? Pain itself is known to be experienced in variable ways, and any hotel review will tell you one person's ultimate luxury is another's shabby hell. The task of the writer is, surely, to reflect the peculiarly specific feeling of their living. Fundamentally, memoirists always manipulate story. Memoir is not autobiography. It involves a careful selection of the parts of our life that fit together to make a narrative - and it can employ a vast spectrum of fictional techniques. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, for example, uses a disjointed narrative arc of strung-together genre tropes (like sci-fi and self-help) to tell the story of her time in an abusive relationship. Helen Garner has written about the careful act of shaping the "I" who appears in her nonfiction. "There can be no writing without the creation of a persona," she says. "In order to write intimately - in order to write at all - one has to invent an 'I'." But it is clear that for Garner, the creation of a persona is not mere invention. We know this because she has spoken, too, about the freedom fiction gives her to make things up - a freedom she no doubt embraced after criticism over her conflation of multiple people into a single person in The First Stone. Much of Frey's indignance now seems to stem from the absurdity of how low the bar has sunk when it comes to standards of truth. And he has a point. To know whether an image is counterfeit, now we have to hope it includes hands (notoriously difficult for AI to master). Ours is a world where social media, absent of checks and balances, is the only growing source of news media. A world where whole journals are compromised by the mass generation of fake science - and where we swallow wholesale the documentarian claims of "reality TV", while knowing it is scripted. In such a world, what's a little fuzziness around the exact reasons a couple found themselves without a home and walking the cliffs of Devon? The contract with a reader is an emotional one - to believe someone has lived through the story they are telling involves a different kind of investment of self: a deeper empathy, a willingness to sit with pain or joy or fear that was real for the writer. And that is worth honouring.
Gulf Today
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
‘The Salt Path' author's next book delayed after ‘distress'
'The Salt Path' is a memoir of resilience and courage that captured the hearts of millions and which was subsequently adapted for the big screen, with actors Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs taking the lead roles. But now, the book and the film are mired in a controversy that could see them suffer that very modern phenomenon — being cancelled. On Friday, publisher Penguin Michael Joseph agreed with author Raynor Winn to delay the publication of her next book, according to long-time specialist magazine The Bookseller. The delay is the latest blowback from a bombshell report in last Sunday's 'The Observer' newspaper in the UK that claimed there was more to the 2018 book than met the eye — that key elements of the story had been fabricated. Author Raynor Winn stands accused of betraying the trust of her readers and of reaping a windfall on the back of lies. Winn accepts 'mistakes' were made, but that the overarching allegations were 'highly misleading.' She has sought legal counsel. Winn's book tells how she and her husband of 32 years, Moth Winn — a well-to-do couple — made the impulsive decision to walk the rugged 630 miles (around 1,000 kilometers) of the South West Coast Path in the southwest of England after losing their house because of a bad business investment. Broke and homeless, the memoir relays how the couple achieved spiritual renewal during their trek, which lasted several months and which saw them carry essentials and a tent on their back. The book also recounts how Moth Winn was diagnosed with the extremely rare and incurable neurological condition, corticobasal degeneration, or CBD, and how his symptoms had abated following the walk. It sold two million copies in the UK, became a regular read at book clubs, spawned two sequels and the film adaptation, which was released this spring, to generally positive reviews. On its website, publisher Penguin described the book as 'an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.' That statement was released before the controversy that erupted last Sunday. In a wide-ranging investigation, The Observer said that it found a series of fabrications in Raynor Winn's tale. It said the couple's legal names are Sally and Timothy Walker, and that Winn misrepresented the events that led to the couple losing their home. The newspaper said that the couple lost their home following accusations that Winn had stolen tens of thousands of pounds from her employer. It also said that the couple had owned a house in France since 2007, meaning that they weren't homeless. And perhaps more damaging, the newspaper said that it had spoken to medical experts who were skeptical about Moth having CBD, given his lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them. The book's ability to engender empathy from its readers relied on their personal circumstances. Without those hooks, it's a very different tale. As a writer of what was represented as a true story, Winn had to attest to her publisher that the book was a fair and honest reflection of what transpired. Any memoir may have omissions or hazy recollections. But making things up are a clear no-no. In the immediate aftermath, Winn made a brief comment on her website about the 'highly misleading' accusations and insisted that the book '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.' She fleshed out her response on Wednesday, describing the previous few days have been 'some of the hardest of my life,' while acknowledging 'mistakes' in her business career. Associated Press
Daily Mirror
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Popular crime writer calls on Goodreads to 'protect authors from online abuse'
Authors have called out Goodreads for failing to remove negative reviews of their novels before they've been released yet - with claims that it constitutes "online abuse" Don't judge a book by a cover – or before it even has a cover. Writers are being reportedly bombarded with negative reviews on Goodreads before proof copies have even been circulated yet. Worse still, the site is allegedly failing to remove them. Crime author Jo Furniss recently called out Goodreads for not doing more to prevent this kind of negative 'review bombing' before their novels have even been released. As a popular book review site, Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, is a go-to for many deciding on their next read. But Jo claims they aren't doing enough to "protect authors from online abuse '. Jo told The Bookseller: 'A lot of authors share the soul-destroying experience of seeing their books trashed before they are even available to genuine readers. Worse, like me, they feel they are given no protection by one of the biggest platforms in the industry.' In a comment piece written for The Bookseller, Jo claimed that her upcoming thriller, Guilt Trip, had a two-star rating on Goodreads – despite not being published yet. She added that no advance copies had been sent out either. After feeling compelled to respond to the anonymous reviewer, Jo claimed that they then complained about the comment. This prompted an email from Goodreads advising authors to "refrain from confronting users who give their books a low rating". Her own comment was subsequently removed. While she emphasised that she 'doesn't care about one petty review', she expressed frustration over the fact that a 'troll' was being given more protection by Goodreads, and claimed their actions constituted a form of 'online abuse'. Jo told The Mirror that she attempted to follow up her complaint over their behaviour. In her email, she informed Goodreads: "I replied to this rating because I believe the reviewer to be fraudulent — this particular book (Guilt Trip) is not yet published or available to be read. It is not possible that this is a genuine review." She claimed that the user had targeted all of her novels with poor reviews, while posting no other reviews of works by other authors. She received a reply from Goodreads saying that they would investigate the issue, but claimed that no further action was taken. However, the review has since been removed after The Bookseller contacted Goodreads, as reported by The Bookseller. For more stories like this visit The Gulp or subscribe to our weekly newsletter for a curated roundup of top stories, interviews, and lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. Romance author Milly Johnson also revealed to The Bookseller that she had a one-star rating for a book that hadn't even been looked over by her copy editor yet. But when she complained to Goodreads, they allegedly responded saying that the reviewer had 'a perfect right to predict if they'd enjoy it or not.' The Mirror reached out to Milly for comment. Goodreads has been associated with the phenomenon of 'review bombing' in the past. In 2023, The Guardian reported that some authors were avoiding using the site due to "mean-spirited" reviews. One of the most notable scandals emerged when writer Cait Corrain was dropped by her publisher after admitting to writing negative reviews about rival authors with a fake account, as reported by The Guardian. That same year, Goodreads pledged to counteract issues like review bombing, such as the ability to 'temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity' that go against their guidelines. The Mirror has reached out to Goodreads for comment. Help us improve our content by completing the survey below. We'd love to hear from you!
Daily Mirror
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
British Audio Awards will be first dedicated awards for audio storytelling in UK
The British Audio Awards - aka The Speakies - are the first dedicated awards for audio storytelling in the UK, recognising the craft of narrators, producers and writers in the audio space A prestigious new awards has launched dedicated 'to celebrating excellence in audiobooks and audio drama' in the country. The British Audio Awards - aka The Speakies - is a joint effort of The Bookseller (host of the British Book Awards) and its sister publication The Stage. Announced on June 10, 2025, The Speakies seeks to recognise the writers, narrators, producers and creative teams that bring stories to life through sound. The awards will highlight work across all genres - including crime, romance, fantasy - with the goal of elevating the status of spoken-word entertainment in the UK. This is the first dedicated awards for audio storytelling in the UK and is set to be an annual event. Nominations are now open across seventeen categories including Best Audiobook in all major genres, Best Performance, Best Audio Drama (Original and Adapted) and Audio Business of the Year. The judges have yet to be announced but will include a mix of experts, artists, celebrities and influencers. Shortlists will be announced in September and the awards ceremony will be held at the Royal Opera House on November 24, 2025. 'We are hugely invested in rewarding and amplifying the audio market, from books to drama, and elevating the incredible work of narrators and performers who bring these works to listeners,' says Philip Jones, Editor at The Bookseller. The recognition for the craft of audiobook production and voice actors and narrators feels particularly poignant given a recent push for AI-driven audiobook production and narration. Jones told The Mirror: 'While we are not anti developments in AI, particularly around translation and voice technologies that may - over time - expand the listening market, these awards are firmly behind the human creators, including those performers who work incredibly hard bringing texts to life for these growing audiences." Help us improve our content by completing the survey below. We'd love to hear from you! Voice actors and even translators have been feeling the pressure after Audible announced in May 2025 that it will offer comprehensive AI production services. The company explained it will work with publishers to produce audiobooks using its new 'fully integrated, end-to-end AI production technology '. Publishers will soon be able to choose from over 100 AI-generated voices across English, Spanish, French, and Italian with multiple accent and dialect options. They can also opt in for 'voice upgrades' for their titles as the technology develops. Less than a month after the AI bombshell, the company also announced a major star-studded audiobook production to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th birthday anniversary. Harris Dickinson (Babygirl) and Marisa Abela (Industry) will take on the iconic roles of Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet respectively for an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. The adaptation will remain 'faithful to the original text' while also adding a 'unique interior perspective' from Elizabeth Bennet. It is set for release in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India and Australia on September 9, 2025. Full list of 2025 British Audio Award categories Best Fiction Audiobook Bes Crime & Thriller Audiobook Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Audiobook Best Romance Audiobook Best Business/Self-Help Audiobook Best Non-Fiction Audiobook Best Non-Fiction Memoir Audiobook Best Children's Audiobook Best Young Adult Audiobook Best New/Original Audio Drama Best Adaptated Audio Drama Best Performance Best Narrator Best Performance Ensemble Best New Voice Performance Audio Business of the Year
The Star
13-06-2025
- The Star
Late bestselling spy novelist Frederick Forsyth was a master of the thriller
A pilot who turned to writing to clear his debts, British author Frederick Forsyth, who died on Monday (June 9) aged 86, penned some 20 spy novels, often drawing on real-life experiences and selling 70 million copies worldwide. In such bestsellers as The Day Of The Jackal and The Odessa File, Forsyth honed a distinctive style of deeply researched and precise espionage thrillers involving power games between mercenaries, spies and scoundrels. For inspiration he drew on his own globe-trotting life, including an early stint as a foreign correspondent and assisting Britain's spy service on missions in Nigeria, South Africa, and the former East Germany and Rhodesia. "The research was the big parallel: as a foreign correspondent you are probing, asking questions, trying to find out what's going on, and probably being lied to," he told The Bookseller magazine in 2015. "Working on a novel is much the same... essentially it's a very extended report about something that never happened – but might have." Forsyth served as a Royal Air Force pilot before becoming a foreign correspondent and a novelist. – AFP Dangerous research He wrote his first novel when he was 31, on a break from reporting and in dire need of money to fund his wanderlust. Having returned "from an African war, and stony broke as usual, with no job and no chance of one, I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts," he said in his autobiography The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue published in 2015. "There are several ways of making quick money, but in the general list, writing a novel rates well below robbing a bank." But Forsyth's foray came good. Taking just 35 days to pen The Day Of The Jackal, his story of a fictional assassination attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle by right-wing extremists, met immediate success when it appeared in 1971. The novel was later turned into a film and provided self-styled revolutionary Carlos the Jackal with his nickname. Forsyth went on to write a string of bestsellers including The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs Of War (1974). His eighteenth novel, The Fox, was published in 2018. Forsyth's now classic post-Cold War thrillers drew on drone warfare, rendition and terrorism – and eventually prompted his wife to call for an end to his dangerous research trips. "You're far too old, these places are bloody dangerous and you don't run as avidly, as nimbly as you used to," Sandy Molloy said after his last trip to Somalia in 2013 researching The Kill List, as Forsyth recounted to AFP in 2016. Real-life spy There were also revelations in his autobiography about his links with British intelligence. Forsyth recounted that he was approached in 1968 by "Ronnie" from MI6 who wanted "an asset deep inside the Biafran enclave" in Nigeria, where there was a civil war between 1967 and 1970. While he was there, Forsyth reported on the situation and at the same time kept "Ronnie informed of things that could not, for various reasons, emerge in the media". Then in 1973 Forsyth was asked to conduct a mission for MI6 in communist East Germany. He drove his Triumph convertible to Dresden to receive a package from a Russian colonel in the toilets of the Albertinum museum. The writer claimed he was never paid by MI6 but in return received help with book research, submitting draft pages to ensure he was not divulging sensitive information. Flying dreams In later years Forsyth turned his attention to British politics, penning a regular column in the anti-EU Daily Express newspaper. He also wrote articles on counter-terrorism issues, military affairs and foreign policy. Despite his successful writing career, he admitted in his memoirs it was not his first choice. "As a boy, I was obsessed by aeroplanes and just wanted to be a pilot," he wrote of growing up an only child in Ashford, southern England, where he was born on Aug 25, 1938. He trained as a Royal Air Force pilot, before joining Reuters news agency in 1961 and later working for the BBC. But after he wrote Jackal, another career path opened up. "My publisher told me, to my complete surprise, that it seemed I could tell a good story. And that is what I have done for the past forty-five years," he recalled in his autobiography. – AFP
