Fiction featuring Care Experience Fifty Shades of Grey E L James 2012 Christian was born into extreme neglect and abuse, with a drug-addicted mother and an abusive environment. At age four, after his mother’s death, he was found by police and brought to the hospital. He was temporarily placed in foster care before being adopted by Grace and Carrick Grey. Despite the stability his adoptive family provided, Christian continued to struggle with the lasting effects of early trauma—emotional withdrawal, aggression, and distrust of therapy. His foster placement and later adoption were life-saving interventions, but they did not erase the deep psychological scars. When literature student Anastasia Steele interviews successful entrepreneur Christian Grey (who leads a BDSM Dom/Sub lifestyle) she finds him very attractive and deeply intimidating. Convinced that their meeting went badly, she tries to put him out of her mind - until he turns up at the store where she works part-time, and invites her out. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Conversations with Myself Nelson Mandela 2011 From letters written in the darkest hours of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished sequel to Long Walk to Freedom, Conversations with Myself gives readers access to the private man behind the public figure. Here he is making notes and even doodling during meetings, or transcribing troubled dreams on the desk calendar in his prison cell on Robben Island; writing journals while on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle in the early 1960s, and conversing with friends in almost seventy hours of recorded conversations. External Website

Performing Arts Judee Sill Judee Sill Judee Sill was a 1970s American singer-songwriter known for her spiritual, genre-blending music. Around the time of high school, Judee Sill participated in a series of armed robberies and was later arrested. She spent nine months in reform school, where she played church organ and was introduced to gospel music. Despite early struggles with addiction and crime, she released two critically praised albums on Asylum Records. Her work, especially songs like “Jesus Was a Cross Maker,” gained cult status after her 1979 overdose. A 2022 documentary renewed interest in her legacy. External Website

Authors A Entitlement ➝ Other Women ➝ The Children's Train (novel) ➝ The Clan of the Cave Bear: The bestselling sweeping historical romance (Earth's Children) ➝ The Inheritance ➝ Murder on North Terrace ➝ The Bee and the Orange Tree ➝ Mansfield Park ➝ Celestial Bodies ➝ The Death of Dora Black ➝ Robert B. Parker's Lullaby ➝ They Do it with Mirrors (novel) ➝ Back to Top

Authors T The sisters reuniting separated siblings at camp ➝ The many faces of James VI & I ➝ Kiri Te Kanawa (Podcast) ➝ Episode 237. Marilyn Monroe ➝ The Children's Homes Scandal ➝ May Wirth: bareback riding queen ➝ The Book Club: Patricia Highsmith ➝ The Lady Imposter ➝ Episode 74 - The Care Experienced Conference ➝ The 'Troubled Teen' Industry ➝ Charlie Chaplin's Funny Walk and Other Music Hall Mysteries ➝ Adoption Beyond the Happy Ending: Trauma and the Stories that Shape Us ➝ John Boyne on The Book Shelf with Ryan Tubridy ➝ The Tangled Branches of Lech Blaine’s Family Tree ➝ Tolstoy: War and the Russian Empire ➝ Life after Adoption from Foster Care ➝ The forgotten children of the Empire ➝ Today in Focus: Bangladesh ➝ Living in class limbo ➝ The Unfinished Prince ➝ The Strange Life of Ingrid Von Oelhafen ➝ The men who survived Kinchela Boys Home ➝ An ode to the telephone ➝ JRR Tolkien ➝ The UpEND Podcast ➝ Jennifer Down and Jonathan Franzen relive the 1970s ➝ Adoption and moral obligation ➝ Trans-national adoption and "blending in" ➝ The Magdalenes and I ➝ The 31: Ukraine's stolen children ➝ The Sunday Read: 'The Blind Side' Made Him Famous. But He Has a Different Story to Tell ➝ The Kids of Rutherford County ➝ The Missing Magdalens ➝ The Lab Detective ➝ When Robert met Maida ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows Cardinal 2018 In the 2nd sereies of this crime drama, villian Ray Northwind was in foster care and showing signs of violence from the age of 9. Two other characters were in kinship care, a low level drug dealer and his sister. In the 3rd season, a woman puts together a foster family of vulnerable young people and then uses them as her 'warriors'. One of the young people was 'in the system' and had already been in trouble for stalking a young woman. The murderous pyschiatrist in the show was orphaned by both parents commiting suicide when he was a child. External Website

Authors K Kids Were Marched Everywhere. This was a Concentration Camp' ➝ Children in need of ‘rescuing’: challenging the myths at the heart of the global adoption industry ➝ The nature boy who could ➝ Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Home survivors mark 100 years as push continues for museum ➝ Back to Top

Autobiography/Memoir Jack Charles: A Born-again Blakfella Jack Charles 2019 Stolen from his mother and placed into institutional care when he was only a few months old, Uncle Jack was raised under the government’s White Australia Policy. The loneliness and isolation he experienced during those years had a devastating impact on him that endured long after he reconnected with his Aboriginal roots and discovered his stolen identity. Even today he feels like an outsider; a loner; a fringe dweller. In this honest and no-holds-barred memoir, Uncle Jack reveals the ‘ups and downs of this crazy, drugged up, locked up, fucked up, and at times unbelievable, life’. External Website

Authors O And the clock struck thirteen: The life and thoughts of Kaurna Elder Uncle Lewis Yerloburka O'Brien as told to Mary-Anne Gale ➝ Rememberings ➝ The Other Side of Absence ➝ The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream ➝ You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are ➝ It's about Healing: Our Story ➝ Childhood Interrupted ➝ Whispering Hope ➝ Hitler's Forgotten Children ➝ That Reminds Me: Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2020 ➝ Left unsaid: a triumph of sibling love over parental neglect & institutional care ➝ A Place called Hope ➝ Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance ➝ I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond ➝ Someone to Love Us ➝ Back to Top

Authors I The Adultification of Black Girls in State Care: Perspectives ➝ Back to Top

Authors J Oi: Snowball Meets Some Very Toxic People ➝ Being Lara: A Novel ➝ The Attic Child ➝ Borrowed Body ➝ Orphan Sisters ➝ Back to Top

Authors M My Life with the Walter Boys ➝ My Parents Are Aliens ➝ My Mum Tracy Beaker ➝ Murder is Easy ➝ Mystery Road: Origin ➝ Maryland ➝ Manifest ➝ Mr Mercedes ➝ McDonald & Dodds ➝ Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries ➝ Marriage ➝ Back to Top

Authors E ‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’, ➝ Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories ➝ Back to Top

Autobiography/Memoir The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames: A Foundling's Story Justine Cowan 2021 Growing up in a wealthy enclave outside San Francisco, Justine Cowan's life seems idyllic. But her mother's unpredictable temper drives Justine from home the moment she is old enough to escape. It is only after her mother dies that she finds herself pulling at the threads of a story half-told - her mother's upbringing in London's Foundling Hospital. Haunted by this secret history, Justine travels across the sea and deep into the past to discover the girl her mother once was. External Website

Authors N Nothing Natural ➝ Back to Top