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Films/Videos The Woman in Black (film) 2012 The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill has been adapted for the screen twice, once in 1989 and again in 2012. The 2012 adaptation starred Daniel Radcliffe. The story is narrated by lawyer Arthur Kipps. When he was a junior solicitor, Arthur Kipps was sent to attend the funeral of Alice Drablow and settle her estate. The estate includes the desolate Eel Marsh House at Crythin Gifford, a small town on the northeast coast of England. While staying at Eel Marsh House, Kipps experiences strange noises – including the screams of a child – and sees the ghostly figure of The Woman in Black. Eventually, Arthur Kipps learns that Alice Drablow and her husband had adopted the son of her sister, an unmarried woman, Jennet Humfrye. The boy died young in an accident and the bereaved Jennet returned to haunt Eel Marsh House as the Woman in Black According to the locals, seeing the Woman in Black signalled the imminent death of a child. External Website

Actors Pom Klementieff Pom Alexandra Klementieff (born 3 May 1986) is a French actress and model. After her father died and her mother was unable to care for her, five year old Pom was raised by relatives. Pom trained at the Cours Florent drama school in Paris and appeared in such French films as The Easy Way (2008) and Sleepless Night (2011), before making her American film debut in Oldboy (2013). She received worldwide recognition for her role as Mantis in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). External Website

Authors M Meera Mistry ➝ Case Shined First Light on Abuse of Children ➝ The Wild Wist ➝ Orphans Making It in the World ➝ Simone Biles' scathing testimony was a warning about power and complicity ➝ "Malcolm Still Speaks." Ibram X. Kendi on George Breitman and the Enduring Legacy of Malcolm X. ➝ Meet Karen Menzies, Australia's first Indigenous Matilda ➝ Who is Ronnie Archer Morgan? ➝ Alma's Not Normal review – this bleak, brilliant comedy is far from ordinary ➝ Smell like a woman, not a rose’: Chanel No. 5 100 years on, an iconic fragrance born from an orphanage ➝ Back to Top

Films/Videos Orphans (1998) 1998 Orphans is a 1998 Scottish black comedy film written and directed by Peter Mullan and starring Douglas Henshall, Gary Lewis and Rosemarie Stevenson. On a grey day in Glasgow, Scotland, three brothers and their disabled sister meet to arrange their mother, Mrs Flynn's, funeral. External Website

Plays & Musicals featuring Care Exp Home Girl (play) Alex Wheatle 2019 Home Girl is the story of Naomi, a teenage girl growing up fast in the foster care system. It is a wholly modern story which sheds a much-needed light on what can be an unsettling life--and the consequences that follow when children are treated like pawns on a family chessboard. Home Girl is fast-paced and funny, tender, tragic, and full of courage--just like Naomi. This brand new stage adaptation of Alex Wheatle’s award-winning novel has been created as a unique collaboration between professional writers Alex Wheatle MBE, Nathan Powell and Sarah Kolawole, Derby Theatre, Derby’s Cultural Education Partnership, professional care-experienced young people and other young theatre makers (our Future Creatives). External Website

Autobiography/Memoir You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are Rudy Owens 2018 Rudy Owens is an advocate for adoptee rights. He lives in Portland, Oregon in the US and in 2018 he published a memoir called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. Born in Detroit in the mid-1960s, 24 years later Rudy Owens finally met his birth family. It then took another 25 years and a legal stoush with the State of Michigan before he received his original birth certificate. Rudy Owens’ book details the lengths he had to go to get his original birth records and his campaign for other adoptees have the right to access their records. In You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, Owen’s also uses a public health perspective to discuss the importance of connections to kin. External Website

Films/Videos Spiderman Spider-Man is a superhero character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Peter Parker is an awkard orphaned teenager living with relatives and being bullied at school when he is bitten by a spider and develops super powers. Spider-Man began life as a comic book character and started appearing in film in 1977 and for television in 1978. Sony Pictures acquired the rights to the character in 1998 and produced the trilogy starring Tobey Maguire (2002-2007) and the Amazing Spider-Man films (2012 and 2014) starring Andrew Garfield. The latest Spider-Man is No Way Home (2021) starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker. External Website

Radio & Podcast Alan Warner: Movern Callar Bookclub (Warner) 2024 In this episode of Bookclub, Alan Warner talks about his debut novel, Morvern Callar (1995), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1996. Morvern Callar was in foster care as a child. As a young adult she is working at a supermarket in a small town. She wakes up on Xmas morning to find her boyfriend has killed himself. She takes the manuscript of his unpublished novel and sends it to the publisher recommended in the young man’s suicide note. However, Morvern passes the novel off as her own. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Shadow and Bone (novel) Leigh Bardugo 2012 Shadow and Bone, written by Leigh Bardugo, is a fantasy adventure narrated by teenage orphan, Alina Starkov. This is the first book in the Grisha trilology. The sequel, Siege and Storm, was published in 2013, and the final in the series, Ruin and Rising, was published in 2014. External Website

Films/Videos Limbo 2023 Limbo (2023) is an Australian film starring Simon Baker as Detective Travis Hurley. Hurley is despatched to an outback town to investigate the disappearance and suspected homicide of an Aboriginal girl, Charlotte Hayes, 20 years previously. Charlotte’s sister, Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) and her brother, Charlie (Rob Collins) don’t expect much from the inquiry. Nothing comes from Hurley’s questioning except the sad knowledge that the police have never treated the Aboriginal people in town very well. By the time he’s summonsed back to town, however, Charlie seems more willing to care for his children, who have been living with Emma. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters A Home from Home? Children and Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1870-1920 Claudia Soares 2023 A pioneering study of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, A Home From Home? presents new information and develops conceptual thinking about the history of children's care by investigating the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision. At its core, the book uses unique first-hand accounts, individual case records, and personal correspondence of children in care in Britain to locate the voices and subjectivities of institutionalised children and their families within the voluntary welfare system between 1870 and 1920. In doing so, it uncovers the real lives, experiences, and attitudes of the children and their families, and offers a timely new approach to understanding the history of children's social care. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Goodbye, Mummy Darling Susan Tickner 2003 This is the story of Susan's journey from foster care in England to being shipped out to Australia when she was nine. External Website

Children's Fiction The Finding Nina 1987 Each year Alex celebrates his finding day rather than his birthday as he was found abandoned, at the age of 5 months next to Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment. On his eleventh finding day, Alex meets Mrs Angel, whose daughter disappeared 11 years ago and looked a bit like Alex. When Mrs Angel dies she leaves her fortune to Alex convinced that he is her grandson. Once the local papers get hold of the story Alex's family is pestered by reporters and Alex feeling it's all his fault, runs away. In this exciting story Alex is just as much a member of the family as the biological children of his parents although his gran struggles to accept this. Her actions cause unnecessary emotional harm which the family have to resolve. External Website

Radio & Podcast BBC Radio 4 - Child of the State Lemn Sissay Poet Lemn Sissay looks for the lost memories of his time in social care as a child. Between the ages of two months and 18 years old, poet Lemn Sissay was a child of the state. In this programme he tracks down the staff, social workers and old friends who remember him from that time, and looks for the lost memories of his years in social care. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Professor's House Willa Cather 1925 The Professor’s House (1925) by American great Willa Cather (1873-1947) is centred around the story of an orphan. Tom was orphaned as a baby and taken in by the O’Briens, “informally adopted” by them in Kansas before the family moved to New Mexico. Tom is a young man when he discovers an ancient city in New Mexico. Unable to persuade authorities in Washington, DC to preserve the site, he returns to New Mexico and discovers, to his horror, that his friend, Roddy Blake, has been looting the site and selling artifacts for a handsome profit. Tom Outland later goes to university where he takes up physics and patents an invention. However, he dies during WW1 and never benefits financially from that invention – as others do. External Website

Films/Videos Train Dreams 2025 Train Dreams (2025) is an American film based on the eponymous 2011 novella by Denis Johnson. The film tells the story of the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton). At the age of 6, young Robert is orphaned & put on a train to travel to live with a family in Idaho. The family that raises him doesn’t tell him where he came from & he spends his younger years without direction or purpose. Robert Grainier becomes a logger & he with his fellow loggers & railroad workers build bridges. He marries Gladys (Felicity Jones) and the couple have a daughter. After the tragic loss of Gladys & Katie in a fire, Robert lives a solitary life as a hermit. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir No Way Home: The terrifying story of life in a children's home and a little girl's struggle to survive Sue Martin 2007 Sue Martin was not three years old when she began life at her first children's home- a home that could at best be described as cold and regimented; at worst, torturous and terrifying.When her mother abandoned her to the protection of the home, Sue was soon to discover that behind the welcoming doors of this reputedly kind-hearted organisation lay a world steeped in lies, cover-ups, victimisation and abuse. At its heart was Boagey, whose perverse bullying was targeted at Sue. External Website

Television Shows The Changeling (TV horror series) 2023 The Changeling (2023) is an American horror series (Appl) adapted from a novel by Victor LaValle. According to Mike Hale in The New York Times: “A changeling is what a fairy or demon or troll leaves behind when it kidnaps a human baby…”The Changeling” on Apple TV+ is about what happens when a mother comes to believe, perhaps correctly, that the tiny thing she is caring for is no longer her baby.” The mother, Emma “Emmy” Valentine (Clark Backo), is an orphan who grew up in kinship care. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Barack Obama 2004 This memoir begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. On the way through he talks about living with his maternal grandparents. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: Vanity Fair 2024 In this recent Vanity Fair article, writer Vincenzo Barney describes meeting now 64 year old Augusta Britt, one time foster child and muse of American writer Cormac McCarthy. When McCarthy was 42, writing his 4th novel but not well known, 16-year-old Augusta Britt met McCarthy at the motel where she’d take showers. By then Augusta had been in foster care for 5 years and its wasn’t safe to have a shower in the home she was currently living in. Augusta recognizes McCarthy from his photo on the back of the book she’s reading – reading is another safe haven for the girl – and introduces herself. Years later, during the 1980s when the two were no longer together, McCarthy sent her the manuscript of All The Pretty Horses (published in 1992). Augusta realized then he’d been writing about her. “I felt kind of violated” she says “All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?...” External Website