Fiction featuring Care Experience Children of Ever After Avery Yearwood 2024 In West Philadelphia, Brittney, a struggling single mother, loses custody of her children, who are placed with Rebecca, a childless professor. As the two women face off in a flawed foster care system, they unexpectedly find connection, compassion, and a new definition of family. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors The Sunlight Pilgrims Jenni Fagan 2017 The Sunlight Pilgrims is set in a caravan park in the north of Scotland. Here. a group of people who live on the margins are waiting out an extreme winter. One character, Stella, is a transgender teenager who is terrified at the relentless march of puberty and who we see struggling to gain acceptance. External Website

Television Shows My Life with the Walter Boys 2023 My Life with the Walter Boys is an American coming-of-age drama series, based on the 2014 eponymous novel by Ali Novak. Recently orphaned Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodrigeuz) is a 15-year-old from Manhattan who is relocated to rural Colorado and the Walters family after the death of her parents. Katherine Walter (Sarah Rafferty) is a veterinarian and was Jackie’s mother’s best friend from Columbia University. During the series it is also revealed that she was adopted as a child. The Walters is a large family with 7 sons and one daughter. They also have the 2 Garcia boys living with them, cousins of the Walter children. The first season of My Life with the Walter Boys concludes with Jackie deciding to return to New York where she will live with an uncle. External Website

Radio & Podcast Bluebells on Bunny Hill Alan And Irene Brogan 2023 When Alan and Irene met in 1959, their connection was instant. Two isolated children, just seven and nine, found warmth and kindness in each other in a children’s home that was unwelcoming and strict. They would steal moments together up on Bunny Hill and talk about their lives. But the home had a rule that boys and girls could not mix. So, when their friendship was discovered, Alan and Irene were separated. On BBC Radio 4’s Life Changing, they explain how it would take four decades for them to find each other again. External Website

Authors U United States of Tara ➝ Unfamiliar ➝ Unorthodox ➝ Under the Bridge ➝ Unsettled ➝ Under a Dark Sun ➝ Unbelievable ➝ Upper Middle Bogan ➝ Unforgiven ➝ Untamed ➝ Until I Kill You ➝ Unforgotten ➝ Back to Top

Television Shows Bodkin 2024 Bodkin (2024) is an Irish black comedy thriller series. An American podcaster (Will Forte) travels to Bodkin, a small Irish town, to explore a cold case – 3 people disappeared 25 years ago. Joining him is London-based but Irish-born Dove Maloney (Siobhan Cullen), an investigative journalist who – at the age of 12 – was left by her mother in a convent and raised by nuns. An adoptee also features in the story; he is convinced he was adopted from Romania. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir This Boy. A Memoir of a Childhood Alan Johnson 2013 Alan Johnson's 2013 memoir, This Boy, was the 2014 Winner of the Orwell Prize and 2014 Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. As many have pointed out, Alan's mother Lily and his sister Linda are the heroes of the story. Lily works multiple jobs to keep her family together, even though her health requires her to be in and out of hospital. Linda ensures that, at the age of 16, the state entrusts 13 year old Alan's care to her after Lily dies. Alan Johnson - after a variety of jobs - became the MP for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle from 1997 to 2017. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance Cyntham Banham 2026 Mother Shadow: A Meditation on Maternal Inheritance (2026) by Australian writer, journalist & lawyer Cynthia Banham is in part the story of Banham finding out that her great-grandmother was not orphaned but abandoned at birth by an unnamed mother. Initially appalled at the discovery a mother could abandon her baby, and wanting to find out more about her great-grandmother, Banham & her family visit Bologna in Italy where she discovers that during the 19th century, babies were often abandoned to avoid shame. Cynthia Banham subsequently reflects on whether her initial harsh judgement of her great-great-grandmother was connected to her own mothering which is ‘different’ because she lost her legs in the 2007 Garuda Flight 200 Crash which killed 21 people. External Website

Academic Articles The Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project: Phase Two Report Zoe Baker 2024 The report presents the key findings from the second phase of the Care-Experienced Graduates' Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations project. It also presents a series of recommendations for policy and practice which intend to better support care-experienced graduates' transitions out of higher education and into employment and/or further study. External Website

Films/Videos States of Fear 1999 States of Fear (1999) is a documentary series produced by Irish journalist and filmmaker Mary Raftery (1957-2012). States of Fear was broadcast on RTE and detailed the abuse children suffered (between the 1930s and 1970s) in reformatory and industrial schools. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was subsequently established in 2000, and the Ryan Report was delivered in May 2009. Fintan O’Toole writes (We Don’t Know Ourselves, p. 519): “What Mary Raftery set out to do in 1998 was to tell the whole story of a system that incorporated fifty-two institutions and incarcerated something close to 50,000 children. She understood that the only way to do this was to listen in depth to hundreds of survivors. She and her researcher Sheila Ahern did what no official body had ever done in the history of the state, which was to treat the evidence of those who had been locked up and abused under its watch as valid.” External Website

Writers Maxim Gorky 1868-1936 Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (1868 – 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. Gorky became an orphan at the age of eleven. He was in kinship care, brought up by his grandmother and ran away from home at the age of twelve in 1880. After an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913–1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). He had associations with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs. Gorky was active in the emerging Marxist communist movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. External Website

Academic Articles Louis Armstrong’s “Karnofsky Document”: The Reaffirmation of Social Death and the Afterlife of Emotional Labor Dalton Jones 2015 This essay examines a controversial memoir Louis Armstrong wrote on his deathbed in New York’s Beth Israel Hospital. I argue that critics have made the mistake of treating each of the narrative’s elements as discrete units. In doing so they have protected the musician’s legacy by detouring around many of the challenges the document poses to some deeply cherished ideas about Armstrong’s life and the significance of his art. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles UK Government's 2010 Apology to Former Child Migrants Child Migrants Trust 2010 "In 2010, at a poignant and historic event, the UK Government formally apologised to thousands of former child migrants who were sent to distant parts of the Commonwealth. The apology, delivered on February 24, 2010, by then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, marked a significant acknowledgment of the suffering experienced by approximately 130,000 children who were forcibly shipped away from Britain, most recently to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia, from the 1870s until 1970." External Website

Television Shows Good American Family 2025 Good American Family (2025) is an American drama series based on the adoption of Ukrainian born Natalia Grace (Imogen Faith Reid), a child with dwarfism. The series is inspired by a true story, that Natalia was abandoned by her adoptive parents, Kristine Barnett (Ellen Pompeo) and Michael Barnett (Mark Duplass). External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Alexander Hamilton Ron Chernow 2005 Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who was orphaned as a boy and who went on to help shape the United States of America. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Edenglassie Melissa Lucashenko 2023 Edenglassie (2023) is the 7th novel by acclaimed Aboriginal Australian writer Melissa Lucashenko. The story is set in two time periods, 2024 and 1854. At the heart of 1854 – and along with colonial violence – are two adoptees. Young Mulanyin, a Yugambeh man, has been adopted in the First Nations system. Nita has been adopted by the Petrie family. Her Aboriginal family was murdered and the tiny child sold first to a sawyer and then Grandfather Petrie “bought her freedom for two pounds”. Nita has been well trained as a servant to the Petrie family and Mary Petrie is reluctant to have Nita leave them to live with Mulanyin because, Nita says, Mary Petrie knows she will be “difficult to replace” (169). External Website

Actors Liz Smith Betty Gleadle (11 December 1921 – 24 December 2016), known by the stage name Liz Smith, was an English character actress. Betty was born in Lincolnshire. Her mother died when Betty was two and she was taken in by her maternal grandparents, seeing her father only occasionally. After Betty's grandfather died, when Betty was seven, Betty's grandmother adopted the child. Liz Smith is known for her roles in BBC sitcoms, including as Annie Brandon in I Didn't Know You Cared (1975–1979), the sisters Bette and Belle in 2point4 Children (1991–1999), Letitia Cropley in The Vicar of Dibley (1994–1996) and Norma Speakman ("Nana") in The Royle Family (1998–2000, 2006). She also played Zillah in Lark Rise to Candleford (2008) and won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for the 1984 film A Private Function. External Website

Films/Videos Night Cries 1990 Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989) is a short experimental film by the esteemed Aboriginal Australian artist, Tracey Moffatt. In the film, an Aboriginal daughter (Marcia Langton) is caring for her dying white mother (Agnes Hardwick). The film was written and directed by Tracey Moffatt and shot entirely in a studio. It was promoted as a possible sequel to Jedda (1955) which was written, produced and directed by Charles Chauvel and which tells the story of an Aboriginal child taken in by a white woman and separated from her own people and culture. External Website

Non Fiction Steering the Mothership: The Complexities of Mothering Lisa Cherry 2014 What if you didn't get the mother you wanted? What if you weren't able to be the mother you planned to be? The stories in this book illustrate the real-life complexities of motherhood. They help every reader to understand their own journey, both as a child and as a mother, and help them investigate the single relationship that affects us most throughout our lives, whether it has been a positive or a negative experience. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand this profound relationship, especially those working in Early Years Development, Social Work or Education. Most importantly, from both a personal and professional perspective, Steering the Mothership will help every reader to develop compassion, for themselves and for others. Includes chapters from authors with care experience. External Website

Films/Videos Orphan Girl 2024 A new video of Brendan Graham’s achingly beautiful song Orphan Girl sung by the UCD Choral Scholars and soloist Abby Molloy and directed/arranged by Desmond Earley. Orphan Girl was written by Brendan Graham for a the Annual Great Famine Commemoration ceremony held in 2012 at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks to commemorate the relocation of over four thousand female orphans who, between 1848 and 1850, were brought from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s. External Website