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Films/Videos Oliver & Company 1988 Oliver & Company (1988) is an American animated musical produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation. The film is loosely based on Charles Dicken’s novel, Oliver Twist (1839). It tells the story of a homeless kitten in New York City joining a gang of street dogs. The dogs include Dodger and are owned by Fagin, the bargeman and petty thief. Eventually, the kitten is taken in by a child who names him Oliver. External Website

Authors S East West Street ➝ Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows Clark 2022 An explanation for the origin of the term ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, forms part of the drama series Clark on Netflix. Clark includes the events of the 1973 Norrmalmstorg, Sweden heist during which a hostage rings the Prime Minister and says she feels safer with the bank robbers than with the police. The hostages went so far as to, apparently, raise money for their captors when the robbers were finally apprehended. Criminologist and psychiatrist, Nils Bejerot, coined the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ when he was asked for assistance by the Stockholm police. The rest of the series tells the story of career criminal Clark Olofsson, (b.1947, played by Bill Skarsgard), who, despite claiming to want freedom, has spent around half of his life in gaol. Clark was in foster care after his brutal father left the family and his mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. External Website

Artists Marina Abramović Marina Abramović (b. 1946) was born in Belgrade. Because her parents were busy with their careers, she lived with her grandmother for 6 years. “Until then,” she writes, “I hardly even knew who my parents were. They were just two strange people who would visit on Saturdays and bring presents. When I was six, my brother was born, and I was sent back to my parents.” Abramović writes of having a very unhappy childhood with her parents. “I grew up with incredible control, discipline, and violence at home. Everything was extreme.” Drawing and performing were ways for her to survive. Despite the difficulties, Marina Abramović remained at home with her parents until she was 29. Marina Abramović eventually moved to Amsterdam. She had several postings to European academies, has given many performances and become known as the “grandmother of performance art” and in 2007, founded the Marina Abramović Institution, a non-profit foundation for performance art. External Website

Authors M The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood ➝ Roots: The eco-Journal ➝ Unbelievable: The shocking truth behind the hit Netflix series ➝ Back to Top

Writers Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874-1942 Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London) in Prince Edward Island (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942). She published as L. M. Montgomery and was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. Her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery, died of tuberculosis (TB) when Lucy was twenty-one months old. Stricken with grief, her father, Hugh John Montgomery, placed Lucy in the custody (kinship care) of her maternal grandparents, though he remained in the vicinity. However, when Lucy was seven, he moved to Prince Albert, North-West Territories. From then on Lucy was raised soley by her grandparents. Anne of Green Gables - Anne Shirley, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. Most of the novels were set in Prince Edward Island, and locations within Canada's smallest province which became a literary landmark and popular tourist site – namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park. She was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935. Montgomery's work, diaries and letters have been read and studied by scholars and readers worldwide. External Website

Authors C Christmas Oranges ➝ Christmas Story ➝ Cruella ➝ Collateral ➝ Child 44 ➝ Care Experienced Video on Vimeo ➝ Clan Library ➝ Chaplin ➝ Carefree ➝ Changing The Narrative ➝ Closure ➝ Cabrini ➝ Careful, He Might Hear You ➝ Case 39 ➝ Christmas Child ➝ Continuous Voices ➝ Christmas Comes But Once A Year ➝ Care Experience & Culture You Tube Channel ➝ Conviction ➝ Back to Top

Authors L Little Bird ➝ Long Bright River ➝ Lost Boys & Fairies ➝ The Law According to Lidia Poet ➝ Lupin ➝ Little House on the Prairie ➝ Lessons in Chemistry (TV Series) ➝ Little Fires Everywhere ➝ Lewis ➝ Long Lost Family ➝ Louis Theroux's Altered States: Take My Baby ➝ London Spy ➝ Lace ➝ Back to Top

Authors P Trauma Proof ➝ Free Loaves on Fridays: The Care System As Told By People Who Actually Get It ➝ Back to Top

Artists Niki de Saint Phalle Niki de Saint Phalle (born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, 29 October 1930 – 21 May 2002) was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work. Niki was born near Paris as Catherine-Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle to an aristrocratic French banker, André, and an American woman, Jacqueline Harper. In 1929 the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression had occurred, and 12 months later the French economy was in difficulties. Niki’s parents decided they would be better off in America and so they left their small baby with her paternal grandparents in Nievre, three hours from Paris. The couple’s son, John, travelled to America with his parents. Three years later, Niki was sent for. Her father was working again as a banker and the family was based in Manhattan, on the Upper East Side. After an early marriage and two children, Niki began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received worldwide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. Her idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A Chance in the World: An Orphan Boy, A Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home Steve Pemberton 2012 Taken from his mother at age three, Steve Klakowicz lives a terrifying existence. Caught in the clutches of a cruel foster family and subjected to constant abuse, Steve finds his only refuge in a box of books given to him by a kind stranger. In these books, he discovers new worlds he can only imagine and begins to hope that one day he might have a different life. Armed with just a single clue, Steve embarks on an extraordinary quest for his identity, only to find that nothing is as it appears. External Website

Authors G Goodnight, Mister Tom ➝ Grace and Frankie ➝ Gosford Park ➝ Girl in the Picture ➝ Gemini Man ➝ Orphan Girl ➝ Gary ➝ Good Will Hunting ➝ Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story ➝ Girls Incarcerated ➝ Back to Top

Writers Catherine Cookson 1906-1998 Dame Catherine Ann Cookson, DBE (née McMullen; 20 June 1906 – 11 June 1998) was a British author. Catherine Cookson was born Catherine Ann Davies into poverty to Alexander Davies and Catherine Fawcett in Jarrow, a town in north-east England on the River Tyne and part of County Durham. Nineteen year old Catherine Fawcett, or Kate as she was known, was unmarried but claimed marital status on her baby’s birth certificate so that the child would not have to suffer the indignity and prejudice of being a ‘bastard’. Catherine Cookson never knew her father and until she was 7 she thought her maternal grandparents were her parents. Cookson is in the top 20 of most widely read British novelists with sales topping 100 million, while retaining a relatively low profile in the world of celebrity writers. Her books were inspired by her deprived youth in South Tyneside, North East England, the setting for her novels. With 103 titles written in her own name or two other pen-names, she is one of the most prolific British novelists. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Ward of the State; The Gap in Ella Fitzgerald's Life Nina Bernstein 1996 Those literary orphans who aren’t totally crushed by their own predicaments may find themselves freed of any limitation whatsoever. They transform. Starting as J. M. Barrie’s “children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way,” they turn into the Lost Boys! Moll Flanders becomes American; Helen Oyeyemi’s Snow White becomes African-American. Orphans discover that they’re the scion of a wizardly family, Kal-El of Krypton, the last of the Jedi, or the mother of the Kwisatz Haderach. They seize their birthrights by the hilt to become Arthur, the Once and Future King. The literary orphan belongs to no world except that of narrative opportunity. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Leaving care (out of print) Mike Stein et al 1986 Professor Mike Stein (Author), Kate Carey (Author). Each year about 14,000 young people aged between 16 and 19 leave the care of local authorities. Far from seeing themselves as on the threshold of adulthood, they are faced with a variety of problems - nowhere to live, little money and few friends or relatives to help them make the adjustment. Despite their predicament very little research has been done on the subject. This book concentrates on this neglected area. For two and a half years Kate Carey and Mike Stein maintained contact with a group of young people who left care in 1982, and, unlike previous studies, their research included those leaving foster care and "home on trial". The book makes extensive use of detailed first-hand accounts to examine how the young people made the transition from care. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for policy, law and practice and offer a strong challenge to the developing consensus view of "independence training" as the main basis of leaving care policy. The text is essential reading for those in contact with or concerned with young people in care. External Website

Authors D Lola in the Mirror ➝ Old Curiosity Shop ➝ Oliver Twist ➝ Boy Swallows Universe (Novel) ➝ David Copperfield: The Personal History of David Copperfield ➝ All Our Shimmering Skies ➝ Great Expectations ➝ Back to Top

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles The Orphanage review – terrific tale of an Afghan teen in trouble Peter Bradshaw 2020 In Shahrbanoo Sadat’s energetic and captivating drama, a movie-mad boy is forced to live in a Soviet-run orphanage during the 1981 occupation External Website

Authors F Martin Figura ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles In Search of the Rarest Book in American Literature: Literary Hub (Bradford Morrow) 2024 Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) is Edgar Allan Poe’s first publication. He was 18 at the time and had left the home of his foster parents in Richmond, Virginia, Nobody would be much interested in rare copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems, says Bradford Morrow in this LitHub article, if Poe had not gone on to: “… invent the modern detective story (think “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”), revolutionize the Gothic genre with tales like “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” pen triumphs of supernatural horror like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and write the classic macabre poem “The Raven,” which many of us tried to memorize as kids—” But because that is what Edgar Allan Poe did, Tamerlane – known as the Black Tulip - is now of interest to “booksellers, archivists, collectors, and Poe scholars around the world.” External Website

Academic theses How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging? Lisa Cherry 2024 The voices of adults who have been in care as a child and were also excluded from school are almost absent in the academic literature about care, education and exclusion. More than that, children who are excluded from their home, in whatever way that has come about, and are also excluded from school face a double challenge in relation to making sense of the fundamental need to belong, that is, to feel safe, to feel accepted, to be connected and to have access to relational wealth. This research seeks to fill that gap in the literature and carve out further opportunities for research on the intersection of school exclusion and being in care as a child, from the lens of the adult that the child became. External Website