Search Results

Autobiography/Memoir The girl in the locker: the true story of twins abandoned by their mother to a life of abuse, and their survival and fight for freedom Sonia St Claire 2014 Sonia St Claire and her twin sister, Sarah, suffered horrific abuse in five different orphanages over the first fourteen years of their lives. They were subject to sexual and emotional abuse and physical violence that would leave both of them traumatized well into their adult lives. A tale of survival that will shock and inspire External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Red Dust Road Jackie Kay 2012 From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red Dust Road is one of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions. In a book remarkable for its warmth and candour, she discovers that inheritance is about much more than genes: that we are shaped by songs as much as by cells, and that what triumphs, ultimately, is love. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Hand Me Down Leigh Bonheur 1972 Hand Me Down is the story of Leigh Bonheur going through the foster care system in New Zealand. The story is narrated by 'Doris'. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game Michael Lewis 2006 The Blind Side has 2 storylines. One is a look at how football strategy has changed over 3 decades and the second is the story of Michael Oher. Michael Oher was a Ward of the State when he was taken in by Tuohy family and supported his schooling and football career. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Tracker Alexis Wright 2017 Stolen Generations legendary figure, Tracker Tilmouth, is the subject of this collective biography by award-winning writer, Alexis Wright. Alexis Wright used an Aboriginal way of storytelling, allowing others she interviewed to have their own say in the biography. Tracker Tilmouth (1954-2015) grew up on the Croker Island Mission from the age of 4 until he went to high school in Darwin, Northern Territory. In Darwin he was moved around between residential facilities and foster care. After he got his Bachelor of Agricultural Science degree in 1991, he worked for the Central Land Council supporting Aboriginal Australians who run cattle stations. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Walk On: The Remarkable True Story of the Last Person Sentenced to Death in Australia Brenda Hodge ​ Brenda Hodge (b. 1951) is an Australian who is notable as the last person to be sentenced to death in Australia. She was found guilty of murdering her de facto partner in 1984 and was sentenced to death. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and she was released in 1995. While she was still a child, Brenda was charged with being a 'neglected child' and placed into a reformatory in Melbourne. After escaping, she was sent between mental hospitals and reformatories, until her biological father contacted her, inviting her to live with him in Brisbane. She later found out he was an alcoholic too and he pressured her into having sex with him. Soon after she ran away and was put into a mental hospital. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles A Lesson in Motherhood Paula McLain 2011 Here, a woman who was in kinship and foster care as a child writes about having to learn how to be the mother she always wanted for herself. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton 1999 The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-Tsix, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders--the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has led a peripetatic childhood in kinship care, foster care and boarding school. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A Place called Hope Tom O'Neill 1981 This book is written by Tom O'Neill, older brother of Dennis O'Neill who died in foster care in England in 1945. Tom O'Neil worked in residential child care, becoming a superintendent. In his book, Tom tells the story of his family and what happened before and after Dennis' death. He also talks about the importance of providing love and care to children who are in distress. External Website

Behind the Scenes David Akinsanya ​ ​ David Akinsanya was born to a Nigerian father and English mother in Essex. After 18 months in a private foster home, his mother was forced to stop paying and he was put into care. Akinsanya stayed in the same family group children’s home run by 'Auntie Betty'. He later learned that she had been told not to reply to his letters and cards (they were given back to him by her family at her funeral). Akinsanya spent time in youth custody but determined to prove he was a 'good person'. He worked for 25 years in broadcasting, making current affairs programmes. He now delivers well being training for the NHS. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up Xiaolu Guo 2018 Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her because they had earlier handed her over to a childhless couple who two years later leave the toddler with her grandparents. In 2002 Xiaolu leaves China and makes her home in Europe.Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Borderline: A Memoir Marie Stella McClure 2017 Self-published. The author suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder from the age of twelve but it went undiagnosed for many years. This resulted in severe behavioural changes which saw her sent to live in social services care homes and then later becoming a drug addict.She pulled herself out of the prison of addiction and managed to turn her life around. She was later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and got herself into various forms of therapy. She went on to become a competing kickboxer and fights regularly in Spain. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours Sarah Sentilles 2021 After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decided to adopt via the foster care system. Knowing that the goal is reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their family—even if it most likely means giving them up. After years of starts and stops, a phone call finally comes: a three-day old baby girl, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home. “You were never ours,” Sarah writes, “yet we belong to each other.” A fierce story about love and belonging, Stranger Care shares Sarah's discovery of what it means to take care of the Other—in this case, not just a vulnerable infant, but the birth mother who loves her too. With her trademark “fearless, stirring, rhythmic” (Nick Flynn) prose, the acclaimed author of Draw Your Weapons brings her creative energies to an intimate story, with universal concerns: What does it mean to mother? How can we care for and protect each other? How do we ensure a better future for life on this planet? And if we're all related—tree, bird, star, person—how might we better live?. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir In Gratitude Jenny Diski 2017 In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given 'two or three years' to live. Being a writer, she decided to write about her experience - and to tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged fifteen, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent fifty years of their complex relationship. Splicing childhood memories with present-day realities, Diski paints an unflinching portrait of two extraordinary writers - Lessing and herself. Jenny Diski died a week after the publication of In Gratitude. A cerebral, witty, dazzlingly candid memoir, it is her final masterpiece. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Life After Care: From Lost Cause to MBE Mark Edwards 2017 In this book, we follow Mark's journey with anxiety, panic attacks and depression, and we learn about the enduring impact his childhood had on his mental health.His diary entries bring to life the thoughts and feelings of Mark, as a teenager, struggling to understand how he came to be placed in care, and how to deal with his adolescent feelings of loss and love.On the verge of breakdown, Mark tried to take his own life and he was sectioned under the mental health act. We follow his journey from local authority care to the wards of a crumbling Victorian psychiatric asylum, and beyond into life on the streets. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body Cheryl L Nixon 2016 Cheryl Nixon's book is the first to connect the eighteenth-century fictional orphan and factual orphan, emphasizing the legal concepts of estate, blood, and body. Examining novels by authors such as Eliza Haywood, Tobias Smollett, and Elizabeth Inchbald, and referencing never-before analyzed case records, Nixon reconstructs the narratives of real orphans in the British parliamentary, equity, and common law courts and compares them to the narratives of fictional orphans. The orphan's uncertain economic, familial, and bodily status creates opportunities to "plot" his or her future according to new ideologies of the social individual. Nixon demonstrates that the orphan encourages both fact and fiction to re-imagine structures of estate (property and inheritance), blood (familial origins and marriage), and body (gender and class mobility). Whereas studies of the orphan typically emphasize the poor urban foundling, Nixon focuses on the orphaned heir or heiress and his or her need to be situated in a domestic space. Arguing that the eighteenth century constructs the "valued" orphan, Nixon shows how the wealthy orphan became associated with new understandings of the individual. New archival research encompassing print and manuscript records from Parliament, Chancery, Exchequer, and King's Bench demonstrate the law's interest in the propertied orphan. The novel uses this figure to question the formulaic structures of narrative sub-genres such as the picaresque and romance and ultimately encourage the hybridization of such plots. As Nixon traces the orphan's contribution to the developing novel and developing ideology of the individual, she shows how the orphan creates factual and fictional understandings of class, family, and gender. External Website

Actors Jamie Foxx ​ ​ Eric Marlon Bishop (born December 13, 1967), known professionally as Jamie Foxx, is an American actor, singer-songwriter, comedian, television presenter, and record producer. And adoptee, Foxx became widely known for his portrayal of Ray Charles in the 2004 biographical film Ray, for which he won the Academy Award, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. That same year, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the crime film Collateral. Since spring 2017, Foxx has served as the host and executive producer of the Fox game show Beat Shazam. Foxx was given his own television sitcom The Jamie Foxx Show, in which he starred, co-created and produced, airing for five highly rated seasons from 1996 to 2001 on The WB Television Network. Foxx is also a Grammy Award-winning musician. External Website

Actors Sidney Poitier ​ ​ Bahamian-American actor, Sidney Poitier (b. 1927), was in kinship care as a teenager. Sidney Poitier was born in Miami, Florida. His parents, Evelyn and Reginald Poitier, were visiting Miami at the time, but they lived on Cat Island in the Bahamas where they grew produce. Sidney finally went to school on a regular basis in Naussau, but by the time he was 13 he had quit and headed out to work. He regularly stole and on one occasion was imprisoned overnight because he could not raise bail. After Sidney’s best friend, Yorick Rolle, was caught and sent to a reform school for stealing a bicycle, Sidney’s family sent him to the United States to live with Cyril, the oldest brother. Sidney Poitier won an Academy Award for Best Actor, the first black male actor to win that award, and was nominated a second time. In addition, he was nominated six times for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor (four times under Motion Picture Drama, and once for both Miniseries or Television Film, and Motion Picture Musical or Comedy) and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (BAFTA) for Best Foreign Actor, winning each once. From 1997 to 2007, he served as the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan. External Website

Artists Samuel Robin Spark ​ ​ Samuel Robin Spark (9 July 1938 – 6 August 2016) was a Scottish artist. He was the son of Sidney Oswald Spark and writer Muriel Spark. Muriel left Sydney Spark in 1940 and two years later she travelled back to the UK without her son; four year old Robin was left in a convent. In 1945 Muriel was able to secure passage to the UK for Robin too, but this time she left the seven year old with his maternal grandparents in Edinburgh while she lived in London. Prolific in his work, Spark created more than 1,000 paintings, photographs, and short texts and articles about art, Jewish culture, and his own family. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir An Orphan's Escape: Memories of a Lost Childhood Frank Golding 2005 This is a story about Frank's childhood in the Ballarat Orphan Asylum. Life there was funny, difficult, boring and fun. External Website