The US release date for the film adaptation of The Salt Path has been confirmed, amid ongoing controversy over author Raynor Winn and her memoir.
The movie, starring Gillian Anderson as Winn and Jason Isaacs as her husband Moth, was released in the UK last summer.
It follows the couple as they embark on a trek along the South West Coast Path, prompted by a series of catastrophes including the loss of their “forever home” and Moth being diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and incurable neurological condition.
Soon after the film’s release, however, an investigation from The Observer cast doubt upon some of the claims made in the memoir, suggesting that parts of the book, which has sold over two million copies worldwide, may have been fabricated.
Winn said that the article was “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”, claiming that it “seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.
Despite this literary scandal, the film will arrive in US and Canadian cinemas on 22 May, and will be distributed by Rialto.
The film was a box office hit in the UK, where it earned £7.6 million, making it one of 2025’s most successful British indie movies.
When the Salt Path scandal broke last summer, its publisher Penguin said that it “undertook all the necessary due diligence” before releasing the book in 2018, and said that it had “not received any concerns about the book’s content” before the investigation was released.
Winn had been due to release another book, her fourth non-fiction title, On Winter Hill, in October 2025, but its publication has since been delayed to January 2028 after the author suffered “considerable distress”.
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”.
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.”
