The Salt Path under fire: How a nature memoir sparked a genre-wide controversy
When Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path was published in 2018, it was hailed as a modern classic. The story of Winn and her husband, Moth, walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path after losing their home resonated with millions. Its mix of raw hardship, wild landscapes and quiet resilience made it an international bestseller, spawned follow-up books (The Wild Silence and Landlines), and helped ignite the UK’s boom in nature memoirs.
However, in 2025, this once-celebrated book is at the centre of a growing debate about truth, publishing, and the way we tell stories of the natural world.
A bestseller questioned
Recent allegations, focused on claims about Winn’s portrayal of Moth’s illness and past financial disputes, have divided readers. Winn has strongly denied any suggestion of wrongdoing, but the conversation has widened far beyond her own work. It has raised a larger question: what do we really expect from the “nature memoir”?
Writers such as Melissa Harrison have long warned that the genre risks becoming too formulaic – an almost therapeutic “redemptive arc,” where personal loss is resolved by losing oneself in the wild. While books like The Salt Path and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun brought nature writing to new audiences, critics argue that many newer titles are repeating the same pattern: trauma, retreat to the landscape, healing.
Publishers under pressure
The controversy has also drawn attention to the publishing industry’s role. Editors admit that in the years since the pandemic, there has been a rush to acquire nature-driven memoirs from first-time authors. Mo Hafeez of Faber recently noted that the genre has “become a default space for processing grief, often by writers who had not previously seen themselves as nature writers at all.”
This openness has made the field more democratic but it has also made it more vulnerable to sameness. The fear is that publishers have favoured emotional resolution over messier, more truthful narratives that acknowledge nature’s harshness as much as its beauty.
A shift towards complexity
In response, a new wave of writers is challenging the model. Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place explores displacement and disconnection through barren landscapes, while Polly Atkin and Natasha Carthew interrogate how chronic illness, poverty and class shape our relationship with nature. Their work, along with that of established names like James Rebanks and Helen Macdonald, reminds readers that nature is not always a cure, it is sometimes lonely, indifferent, even brutal.
If anything, the debate around The Salt Path has become a test case for the genre itself. Can nature memoirs evolve into something more varied and less neatly redemptive? Or will publishing continue to chase the familiar, comforting template that first made Winn a household name?
What’s clear is that this conversation is far from over. As the British Library’s guide to nature writing shows, the genre has deep roots in the UK literary tradition and its next chapter may be the most important yet.
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