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Films/Videos Gary 2024 Gary (2024) is an American documentary about the life of actor Gary Coleman, directed by Robin Dashwood and release on 29 August 2024. The film explores Coleman’s life – including his ongoing ill health - as a child star after his success in Diff’rent Strokes and his struggles with fame. Also covered is that Coleman became estranged from his adoptive parents after he found they – and his business manager - had allegedly been stealing from the trust fund he had set up as a 10-year-old. Coleman’s parents denied they were doing anything wrong. There are also questions raised about Coleman’s death, about the circumstances of the fall which caused his head injury. At the time he was living in Utah with his ex-wife Shannon Price with whom he had a difficult relationship. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Street urchins, sociopaths and degenerates: orphans of late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction William David Floyd 2014 From the notable emergence of orphan figures in late eighteenth-century literature, through early- and middle-period Victorian fiction and, as this book argues, well into the fin de siècle, this potent literary type is remarkable for its consistent recurrence and its metamorphosis as a register of cultural conditions. The striking ubiquity of orphans in the literature of these periods encourages inquiry into their metaphoric implications and the manner in which they function as barometers of burgeoning social concerns. The overwhelming majority of criticism focusing on orphans centres particularly on the form as an early- to middle-century convention, primarily found in social and domestic works; in effect, the non-traditional, aberrant, at times Gothic orphan of the fin de siècle has been largely overlooked, if not denied outright. This oversight has given rise to the need for a study of this potent cultural figure as it pertains to preoccupations characteristic of more recent instances. This book examines the noticeable difference between orphans of genre fiction of the fin de siècle and their predecessors in works including first-wave Gothic and the majority of Victorian fiction, and the variance of their symbolic references and cultural implications. External Website

Radio & Podcast The babies of Holnicote House Deborah Prior 2021 Deborah Prior was one of 1000s of mixed-race children born in the United Kingdom after the Second World War. Because of social stigma, many of those children were separated from their parents. Deborah was raised in Holnicote House from when she was a 2 week old baby until she was 5. She was then adopted. Deborah did not meet her birth mother until she was 50. External Website

Authors H No One ➝ The Valley ➝ The Watch Tower ➝ Tales of the Otori ➝ Fragile ➝ Two O'Clock Boy ➝ The Black Opal ➝ The Subjects ➝ Cazalet Chronicle Collection ➝ The Bone People ➝ Orphan X (novel series) ➝ The Foundling (2020) ➝ Florence and Giles ➝ Into the Water ➝ Bobbin Up ➝ Someone Else's Skin ➝ Where The Dead Sit Talking ➝ The Shadow of the Lynx ➝ No One Was Watching ➝ The Alternatives ➝ Mr Splitfoot ➝ The Doll Funeral ➝ A Discovery of Witches ➝ The Secret of Lost Things ➝ Quieter Than Killing ➝ The Woman in Black (novel) ➝ Kirkland Revels ➝ Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine ➝ Dog Boy ➝ Les Misérables (novel) ➝ Their Eyes Were Watching God ➝ Back to Top

Autobiography/Memoir Lion: A Long Way Home Saroo Brierley 2017 Aged just five, Saroo Brierley lost all contact with his family in India, after waiting at a train station for his brother who never returned. Adopted and raised in Australia, Saroo Brierley tells the story behind the film, Lion, in which a lost little boy who finds his way home twenty-five years later. External Website

Authors N Bandmaster and academic ➝ Musician, actor, activist ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Small Axe, Series 1, Alex Wheatle 2020 The true story of writer Alex Wheatle who grew up in care and his spell in prison after the Brixton riots. Alex Wheatle follows the true story of award-winning writer, Alex Wheatle (Sheyi Cole), from a young boy through his early adult years. Having spent his childhood in a mostly white institutional care home with no love or family, he finally finds not only a sense of community for the first time in Brixton, but his identity and ability to grow his passion for music and DJing. When he is thrown in prison during the Brixton Uprising of 1981, he confronts his past and sees a path to healing. External Website

Authors P Parable of the Sower ➝ The Harp in the South ➝ Sixkill ➝ There Was Still Love ➝ Run ➝ A Girl Returned ➝ Shy ➝ The Butcher Boy ➝ Poor Man's Orange ➝ Home ➝ Doctor Zhivago ➝ Alex Cross (Novel Series) ➝ Winter Solstice ➝ Political Suicide ➝ Missus ➝ When Hoopoes Go To Heaven ➝ The Dutch House ➝ The Lost Child ➝ In The Clearing ➝ Back to Top

Authors I Simone Biles becomes youngest living person to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom ➝ Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later ➝ The One Percent compilation ➝ Back to Top

Poets David O'Brien David O'Brien Australian poet, David O'Brien (b. 1957), spent his childhood in orphanages. David and his three siblings were abandoned by their parents in the late 1950s and made Wards of the (South Australia) State. David grew up in a Catholic orphanage with his brother, later attending a Catholic boarding school. The boys were separated from their two sisters.David has had a varied career, including working as a model. He's been living in the Blue Mountains, NSW, for more than 20 years. Two years ago he set up the Blackheath Community OpShop. Encouraging men to live in a more peaceful way - with other humans and with the earth - is the theme running through his 2014 book, A Hunbler Mankind. External Website

Authors D Peter Llewelyn Davies ➝ Back to Top

Artists Lonnie Holley African-American artist and musician, Lonnie Holley (b. 1950) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He was the 7th of 27 children and had a difficult childhood including being sent out to work at the age of 5 and living in various foster homes. Lonnie Holley began his career as an artist by carving (in 1979) tombstones for his sister’s 2 children who had died in a house fire. From there, he made other carvings which in 1981 were displayed at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Soon his work was being bought by many institutions and has been displayed at the White House. Lonnie Holley began his career as a musician in 2006. He released his 4th album in 2022 to critical acclaim. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Representing Aboriginal Childhood The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia Joanne Faulkner 2023 Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia (2023) by by Australian academic Joanne Faulker investigates ways in which Aboriginal children have been represented over the decades. Faulker uses literature and film, as well as public discourse including from the government and by news outlets, to show that representations of Aboriginal children tend to occlude colonial violence. Reference to Jedda (1955) is made and to the Bringing them Home Report (1997) about the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their families. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Choose Me Kay Langdale 2013 Billy is only nine years old. But he's already learned that when your mum dies, you get your own social worker. He's also learned that once you are ten, the odds of finding a family to adopt you don't look so good. That's the part he wasn't supposed to overhear. Miriam Riley is up against a deadline to give Billy the 'forever family' that every child deserves. Determined to cut through red tape, she finds three very different couples who might fit the bill, though prospective parents come with issues of their own. Through Billy's watchful eyes, the summer unfolds. What does he really need? Will anyone choose him? External Website

Authors K Jackie Kay (Poet) ➝ John Keats ➝ Back to Top

Authors B Transmedia Harry Potter: Essays on Storytelling Across Platforms ➝ Orphans of Empire. The fate of London's foundlings ➝ The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance ➝ Back to Top

Authors C The Wanderer ➝ Coram Boy ➝ Walk Two Moons ➝ Tell me again about the night i was born ➝ Back to Top

Authors R Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie ➝ Richard Rhodes ➝ Jean-Jacques Rousseau ➝ Nancy Reagan ➝ Bertrand Russell ➝ Eleanor Roosevelt ➝ Jill Roe ➝ Back to Top

Authors W Heather Waters ➝ Dale Wasserman ➝ Back to Top

Authors P University Lectures and Lesson in Life ➝ A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, A Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home ➝ Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence ➝ Little One ➝ Doug's story: the struggle for a fair go ➝ The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave by Mary Prince ➝ Feathers of the Snow Angel: Memories of a Child in Exile ➝ A Lonely Little Girl Goes to University ➝ Back to Top