Despite multiple claims that The Salt Path was her first book, Raynor Winn had written another title under a pseudonym six years earlier.
Winn found herself embroiled in controversy last year when an investigation by The Observer claimed that parts of her bestselling memoir The Salt Path, which told the story of how she and her husband, Moth, walked the South West Coast Pat after a string of private tragedies, were fabricated. In response, Winn called the article “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”, adding that it “seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.
The author's lawyers, however, have recently admitted that one facet of her story was not true. In press interviews publicising 2018’s The Salt Path, Winn had repeatedly claimed that it was her first book.
In a new BBC Sounds podcast Secrets of the Salt Path, however, Winn’s lawyers confirmed on her behalf that she previously wrote a book under the alias Izzy Wyn-Thomas in 2012.
The book was published by a company owned by Winn and her husband, and was sold as part of a prize draw to win their home in north Wales.
In several interviews, Winn had gone on the record to say that she had never written a book before. Speaking to Waterstones in 2020, she said: “It’s the first thing I’ve written since I was a teenager leaving school – the first thing.”
Her husband Moth similarly claimed that he had no idea that his wife could write before completing The Salt Path, whose success spawned two sequels and a 2024 film adaptation film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
Reiterating her lack of experience in the industry, Winn also told BBC Radio Cornwall in 2019 that she had “googled for an agent, as you do when you have no connections and no idea what you were doing”.
The book in question was published by Gangani Publishing, which was set up in March 2012 and registered to an industrial estate just outside of Bangor, Gwynedd.
Companies House lists Tim Walker as the director, and Sally Walker as the shareholder – these are the legal names of Raynor and Moth Winn, as revealed in The Observer investigation.
As reported by The BBC, Gangani Publishing appears to have published a single book: How Not to Dal By Dir by Izzy Wyn-Thomas. Dal Dy Dir is a Welsh nationalist phrase, meaning “stand your ground”.
The book 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”, according to its online blurb.
Copies of the book – which is Izzy Wyn-Thomas’s first and only book, according to the National Library of Wales – are difficult to track down given that only a few were printed.
Matt Swarbick, a farmer in Henbant, near Caernarfon, was one of the people who read the book. He told the BBC that he was interested in stories similar to his own, after he had bought an abandoned farm in north Wales.
Five copies of the book were stocked in a Pwllheli-based Welsh language bookshop, with the owner telling the BBC that the title and the contents of the book did not align. “They didn’t give it much chance to sell,” he told the BBC.
Gagani Publishing tried to market the book online. In 2012, they posted to an online forum called The Accidental Smallholder, designed to provide support for smallholders and gardeners to say that anyone who bought the book would be entered into a prize draw to win their friend’s house, which they had to let go due to ill health.
The home was advertised as a prize “free of mortgage or any other legal or registered change”.
The details in the post were not true. The house that was being raffled off belonged to Raynor and Moth, Pen Y Maes near Pwllheli, and did have a debt as well as a mortgage registered against it, according to Land Registry documents seen by the BBC.
After allegedly embezzling around £64,000 from her former employer Martin Hemmings,Raynor is said to have borrowed money from a family member in 2008 in order to repay it. The debt was later transferred to a different lender in 2010 and carried an interest rate of 18 per cent.
Offering a property burdened by debt as mortgage-free could amount to fraud. There is no record of Gangani Publishing being investigated by the local authority, Cyngor Fwynned. The council have confirmed that they have no intention of looking into the matter given the time that has passed.
In a lengthy statement issued in the aftermath of The Observer investigation, which detailed the alleged embezzlement, Winn said she was “truly sorry” for “mistakes” made while working with her former employer, Martin Hemmings, “in the years before the economic crash of 2008”.
She also admitted that she and Moth were behind the prize draw, stating: “It was a mistake, as it clearly wasn't going to work. We cancelled it and refunded the few participants.”
Winn and Moth declined to answer questions or a request for an interview for the Secrets of the Salt Path podcast.
Winn won the Christopher Bland Prize for The Salt Path, an award of £10,000 for “a debut novelist or non-fiction writer first published in any form aged 50 and over”.
Asked whether the discovery that it was not Winn’s first book would affect her award, the Royal Society of Literature told the BBC that in 2019 – the year that The Salt Path won the prize – entries from writers who had previously self-published had been allowed.
Published in 2018, The Salt Path tells how Winn and her husband, Moth, walked the South West Coast Path, a gruelling journey of 630 miles, after a string of private tragedies including the loss of their home in Wales and Moth being diagnosed with a neurological condition.
The accuracy of Moth’s corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and incurable neurological condition, was among the elements of Winn’s book that The Observer cast serious doubt over. Winn has said these allegations are “the most heartbreaking” of all, sharing photographs of redacted clinic letters, addressed to Timothy Walker (Moth’s real name), that appear to show that he is “treated for CBD/S and has been for many years”.
Alongside the photos, Winn added: “As I’ve explained many times in my books, we will always be grateful that Moth’s version of CBS is indolent, its slow progression has allowed us time to discover how walking helps him. Others aren’t so lucky.”
The Salt Path’s publisher Penguin said that it “undertook all the necessary due diligence” before publishing Winn’s book in 2018.
Penguin was due to publish Winn’s fourth book in October 2025, but the title has been delayed indefinitely because the author had suffered “considerable distress”.
In December 2025, the release date was updated to January 2028.
