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Writers Soren Sveistrup Soren Svestrup (b. 1968) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was adopted as a baby and taken to live with his adoptive parents on a small remote island, Thuro in the south-east of Denmark. He returned to Copenhagen to study at university, studying history, literature and scriptwriting. He started writing episodes for television shows for Danish Broadcasting, but is best known for The Killing, a police procedural featuring a detective who was in foster care, Sara Lund. His first novel, The Chestnut Man (2019) became Netflix Series in 2021. Child protection is the theme in The Chestnut Man; one man has decided the child protection system is inadequate and he has become a vigilante on behalf of neglected children. External Website

Children's Fiction The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1835-1910) is set in the 1840s in the small town of St. Petersburg, Missouri (based on Hannibal in Missouri where Mark Twain lived as a child). Tom Sawyer is an orphan who lives with his Aunt Polly and brother Sid. Tom is an entrepreneurial character, often persuading other boys to pay him for doing his work, eg, painting the front fence. Tom’s many adventures include running away from home with his friends Joe Harper & Huckleberry Finn and returning in time to attend his own funeral. There was controversy in 2011 when a new edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) removed offensive racist words. External Website

Authors D I've been bloody lucky: the story of an orphan named Jimmy Butt ➝ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ➝ The God Squad ➝ 95 Years with John "Jack" Day: The Orphan Nobody Wanted, an Autobiography (not available online) ➝ Shadows in Paradise ➝ Out of the Mist & Steam ➝ Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina ➝ Evelyn: A True Story ➝ Back to Top

Authors D Robert Duncan ➝ Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (poet) ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience Swallow the Air Tara June Winch 2006 Swallow the Air (2006) is the critically acclaimed first novel by Aboriginal Australian writer, Tara June Winch. The narrator is May Gibson whose mother has killed herself and she and her older brother, Billy, have been taken in by their Aunty. When Aunty’s gambling and alcoholism has become unbearable and Billy has left home, 15 year old May leaves home too, in search for her white father and for her mother’s Aboriginal family. The story May tells of grief and loss is devastating, but the story has a hopeful ending when May realises where home is. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Sunday's Child? A Memoir by Leslie Baruch Brent Jocelyn Morris Morris et al. 2010 Leslie Brent had born in 1925. In 1938, he was chosen with several other boys at the Orphanage to travel to England on the first of the many Kindertransports. He spent the evening before he left with his family who comforted him with the idea that this would be a temporary separation. He never saw any member of his family again. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Along the Way Maureen Flanagan 2002 Maureen O’Shea was removed from her mother as a baby on the grounds the child was neglected. Cliona O’Shea was struggling at the time with poverty and ill health. Although she got the older 4 children back, Cliona eventually relinquished Maureen for adoption External Website

Authors F Jimmie Fails ➝ Jamie Foxx ➝ Back to Top

Authors C Cross ➝ Carlo & Malik ➝ Cigarette Girl ➝ Colin in Black & White ➝ Counterpart ➝ Clark ➝ Clickbait ➝ Cardinal ➝ Criminal Record ➝ Cracker ➝ Clean Sweep ➝ Call the Midwife ➝ Critical Incident ➝ Back to Top

Autobiography/Memoir Orphaned by the Colour of My Skin: A Stolen Generation Story by Mary Terszak Mary Terszak 2008 Orphaned by the Colour of My Skin (2008) by Mary Terszak weaves together auto-ethnography and archival evidence to tell the story of Terszak's removal from her family at the age of 2 in the context of the broader history of Aboriginal 'protection' in Australia. Terszak uses herself as a case study and includes a comparison of her situation with that of non-Aboriginal children who were also removed from families and institutionalised. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Lord of the Flies (novel) William Golding 1954 Lord of the Flies (1954) is the debut novel of British writer William Golding. In the midst of war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britian is shot down over a deserted tropical island. At first, the displaced boys, seperated from family, enjoy their life without adult supervision. They divide themselves into the ‘littluns’ – boys around the age of 6, and the ‘biguns’, those between 10 & 12. Ralph is elected the leader – he represents order and democracy. Jack wants to be leader and draws other boys away from Ralph’s influence. He becomes increasingly aggressive and interested in hunting, and some of the boys follow his lead. The boys break into two groups, one led by Ralph and one by Jack. The boys' appetite for blood leads them to hunting humans... External Website

Authors T The One Percent - We have dreams and aspirations ➝ The BFG (film) ➝ The Wonder ➝ The Children's Train ➝ The Christmas Note ➝ The Secret of Roan Inish ➝ The Secret Garden ➝ The Butcher Boy (film) ➝ The Wizard of Oz ➝ The Last Daughter ➝ The Windermere Children ➝ Two Heads Creek ➝ The Buckingham Murders ➝ The Girl in the Spider's Web (film) ➝ The Thirteenth Tale ➝ The Mission ➝ The Cider House Rules (1999) ➝ Terminator 2: Judgement Day ➝ The Changeling (1980) ➝ The Forgotten Maggies ➝ The Inheritance (film) ➝ The Reality of Foster Care ➝ The Witches ➝ The Power of One ➝ The Last Tree ➝ The Kid (1921) ➝ The Sleeper ➝ 12 Mighty Orphans ➝ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ➝ The Last Black Man in San Francisco ➝ The Woman in the Window (film) ➝ The Strays ➝ The Harder They Fall ➝ The Department ➝ The Blind Side ➝ The Marvellous Martha ➝ Take Care of Maya ➝ The Accidental Twins ➝ The Chaperone (2018) ➝ The Proposal ➝ The Silencing ➝ The Family ➝ Cousins ➝ The Grinch ➝ The Woman in Black (film) ➝ The Personal History of David Copperfield ➝ The Changeling (crime drama) ➝ The Book Thief (film) ➝ The Pale Blue Eye (film) ➝ The Limehouse Golem ➝ The Christmas Bunny ➝ The Rise of Skywalker ➝ The Illustrated Mum (TV movie) ➝ The Batman ➝ The Life Ahead ➝ The Magdalene Sisters ➝ The Thirteenth Year ➝ The Tearsmith (Film) ➝ Three Identical Strangers ➝ The Last Jedi ➝ The Song of Names ➝ The Protege ➝ The Beautiful Game ➝ The Hurricane ➝ The Talented Mr Ripley (Film) ➝ The Boxcar Children (film) ➝ The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes ➝ Taking Hold of Our Heritage (film) ➝ The Missing Children ➝ The Real Mo Farah ➝ Thirteen ➝ The Postcard Killings ➝ The Umbrella Academy ➝ The Goldfinch (2019) ➝ The Importance of Being Earnest ➝ The Unloved ➝ The Sea Beast ➝ The Quiet Girl ➝ The Unforgivable ➝ Back to Top

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Discovery of Witches Deborah Harkness 2011 Deborah Harkness’ debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, is the story of Diana Bishop who was born to Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor, both extremely powerful witches. From a very early age, she displayed signs of extraordinary power and ability, notably time-walking at the age of three. At the young age of seven, she was orphaned when both of her parents were killed while in Africa. Subsequently, she was raised by her aunt Sarah Bishop and Emily Mather, Sarah's partner. This terrible loss of her parents caused Diana to reject her magic altogether. Diana went on to obtain a bachelor's degree from a college in Maine and a graduate degree from Oxford. After she obtained her PhD, she became a professor of history at Yale. External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Angelina Jolie's casting game with Cambodian orphans sparks outrage Harriet Alexander 2017 Angelina Jolie has come under fierce criticism for describing the casting of Cambodian children in her new film, in which the team gave the impoverished youngsters money and then pretended to take it away from them, awarding roles to the children who looked the most upset. External Website

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

Television Shows Bones 2005 Bones is an American crime procedural featuring forensic anthropologist, Dr Temperance "Bones" Brennan. Temperance was put into foster care when she was 15 years of age. The foster system was unstable and abusive. Despite going to 12 different schools while in foster, Temperance ended up with 3 doctorates and does occasional contract work with the FBI External Website

Academic theses Hiraeth (a novel): Representations of Care-Experience in Literature Rosie Canning ➝ Abandoned Children in Literature: The Orphans in J.K. Rowling’s Cecilia Friis ➝ The Orhan Among Us: An Examination of Orphans in Newbery Award Winning Literature April A Mattix ➝ How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging? Lisa Cherry ➝ The Fictional Onscreen Depiction of Looked-after Young People: "Finding someone just like me." John Hickman ➝ What Effect does Life Story Work have on Life Writing? Deyanna Ricketts ➝ Orphans and Class Anxiety in Nineteenth-century English Novels Junghan Choi ➝ What’s the story? Sociological explorations of the life course narratives of adults with care experience Catriona Hugman ➝ Women and Music in the Venetian Ospedali Vanessa Tonelli ➝ Back to Top

Authors L Darkly Dreaming Dexter ➝ The Children's Home ➝ Crow Lake ➝ Motherless Brooklyn (novel) ➝ The Long Song ➝ The Golden Age ➝ Safe With Me ➝ Ginny Moon ➝ The Girl in the Spider's Web (novel) ➝ Choose Me ➝ The Foundling (2022) ➝ Caging Skies ➝ Patience ➝ The Twins ➝ Too Much Lip ➝ The Everlasting Sunday ➝ The Fall of Man in Wilmslow ➝ The Girls ➝ The Memoirs of a Survivor ➝ Small Island ➝ The Flight of Gemma Hardy ➝ Murder in the Mill-Race: A Devon Mystery ➝ Edenglassie ➝ Lily: A Tale of Revenge ➝ Back to Top

Performing Arts American-Swiss singer, songwriter, actress Tina Turner American-born Swiss singer, Tina Turner* (b. 1939), was in kinship care as a teenager. Tina Turner, who has African American heritage, was born Anna Mae Bullock into a sharecropping family in Nutbush, Tennessee. Her parents, Zelma and Floyd Bullock, fought constantly and eventually, when Tina was about 11, Zelma left the family. Floyd remarried, but he too abandoned his family, leaving his teenage girls with relatives. When Tina was 16, she felt stifled by the small town of Nutbush and, encouraged by her sister, set out to St Louis to be with her sister and mother. It was in Club Manhattan, St Louis, that Anna met Ike Turner of the Kings of Rhythm and became Tina Turner. Within months of Tina performing with the group, the Kings of Rhythm had a hit record. Soon the group became the Ike and Tina Turner Review. In 1976 Tina Turner left what she says was an abusive marriage with Ike Turner. The couple divorced in 1978. Tina Turner then embarked on her solo career, with Private Dancer (1984) becoming an international success. Tina Turner moved to Switzerland in 2013 and subsequently relinquished her US citizenship. She is the author of 2 autobiographies. Both Ike and Turner were “inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. Tina also received a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2018. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Old Curiosity Shop Charles Dickens et al. 1840 13 year old Nell Trent, an orphan, is in kinship care with her grandfather; the two live together in the Old Cuiosity Shop in London. Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate. External Website