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.