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Academic Articles ‘Is this a joke?’ Exploring how care experienced people feel their way through inheritance and what their emotions ‘do’, Delyth Edwards & Rosie Canning 2023 The article explores how care-experienced people navigate the emotions tied to inheritance. Inheritance is often a way of making or unmaking family bonds, yet for care-experienced people it frequently provokes exclusion, loss, and anger, as seen in social media responses. The authors argue that inheritance acts as a source of feeling for this group, who, though marginalized in conventional inheritance practices, use their emotions to reimagine and create alternative forms of inheritance. Drawing on Ahmed’s notion of “what emotions do,” the article shows how care-experienced people transform feelings of being othered into new ways of forging inheritance. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Thousand Moons Sebastian Barry 2021 Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live… Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. External Website

Films/Videos Star Wars: The Force Awakens 2015 This is the 7th episode of the "Skywalker sage" and the first film which introduces Rey, a scavenger and orphan character. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Imagine This: Growing Up with My Brother, John Lennon Julia Baird 2008 Julia Baird, sister of John Lennon writes that until now, the true story of John Lennon's childhood has never been told. Julia has herself been on a personal journey that has made it possible only now to reveal the full extent of the pain and difficulties - as well as the happier times - living inside John Lennon's family brought. Julia reveals the various strong, self-willed and selfish women who surrounded John as he grew up. John was removed from his mother at the age of 5 to live with his Aunt Mimi, and here Julia shows for the first time the cruelty of this decision - to both mother and son, she sheds a new light on his upbringing with Mimi which is often at dramatic odds with the accepted tale. John's frequent visits to his mother and sisters gave him the liveliness, freedom and love he sought and allowed him to develop his musical talents. The tragic death of their mother, knocked down outside Aunt Mimi's house by a speeding car when John was 17, meant that life for him and his sisters would never be the same again. Poignant, raw and beautifully written, Imagine This casts John Lennon's life in a new light and reveals the source of his emotional fragility and musical genius. It is also one family's extraordinary story of how it dealt with fame and tragedy beyond all imagining. External Website

Films/Videos Louis Theroux: Saville 2016 In 2000, British-American documentary maker, Louis Theroux (b. 1970) spent 3 months or so working with the infamous Jimmy Savile (1926-2011) on a documentary about the English media personality, When Louis Met Jimmy (2000) 15 years later, he set out to find out why he was so ‘gullible’, so taken in by Savile that he missed the truth of Savile’s longstanding criminal behaviour. Louis Theroux: Savile (2016) is the result. The film includes interviews with those who were victims of Savile, including Kat who was in state care while at boarding school. It also includes interviews with those who knew and worked with Savile, some of whom still find it hard to believe Savile’s behaviour. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream Katharine Norbury 2016 Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by loving adoptive parents, she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the beauty of the British countryside. One summer, following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child, Katharine and her nine-year-old daughter Evie decide to follow a river from the sea to its source. But a chance circumstance forces Katharine to the door of the woman who gave her up all those years ago.Combining travelogue, memoir, exquisite nature writing, fragments of poetry and tales from Celtic mythology, The Fish Ladder is a captivating and life-affirming story about motherhood, marriage, family, and self-discovery, illuminated by the extraordinary majesty of the natural world. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience Mr Potter Jamaica Kincaid 2002 Mr Potter (2002) by Jamaica Kincaid is the story of a man who grew up in foster care on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. The story is told by one of Mr Potter's many unacknowledged girl children, Elaine Cynthia Potter, in a strange, repetitive, incantatory, and compelling manner. Roderick Potter (1922-1992) dies quite well off financially, having long been a chauffeur before he saved enough money to set himself up in business. According to his daughter, he couldn't read or write. It was Roderick's mother who put him into foster care with the Shepherds - before she drowned herself - and Mr Shepherd who taught Roderick how to drive. External Website

Films/Videos The Wonder 2022 The Wonder (2022, Neflix) is set in Ireland in 1862. An 11 year old girl, Anna (Kila Lord Cassidy) hasn't eaten in 4 months and English nurse, Elizabeth Wright (Florence Pugh) is sent out to the rural village to observe the girl for 2 weeks. Elizabeth and a nun, Sister Michael (Josie Walker), are to report their findings to a panel of men, including a medical doctor and priest. Rather than have Anna die of starvation, Elizabeth teams up with journalist, William Byrne (Tom Burke) and the pair rescue the girl. The last we see of the 3, they are onboard a ship heading for Sydney. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Black Boy Richard Wright 2008 Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred and a stint in an orphanage and in kinship care. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo." External Website

Authors A Above Suspicion ➝ Agatha Christie's Marple ➝ American Horror Story: Asylum ➝ A Fortunate Life (TV Mini-Series 1986) ➝ A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV series) ➝ Anh Do's Brush with Fame ➝ All the Light We Cannot See ➝ Alex Rider ➝ Alma's Not Normal ➝ Anne with an E ➝ Archie ➝ A Deadly American Marriage ➝ They Do it with Mirrors (tv show) ➝ A Discovery of Witches (TV show) ➝ Ashes to Ashes ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Let’s Not Forget Charles Dickens’s Other Christmas Ghost Stories! Literary Hub (Olivia Rutigliano) ) 2024 As Olivia Rutigliano says in this Literary Hub article, A Christmas Carol (1843) might be the best known of Charles Dickens’ Christmas stories but it’s not the only Christmas ghost one he wrote. There’s also: • “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” a story in The Pickwick Papers (1836) • “The Mother’s Eyes,” a story in Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840) • The Chimes (1844) • The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-Time (1848) • “The Haunted House” (1859) • The Signalman (1866) External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience A Whole Life Robert Seethaler 2015 Andreas Egger’s first memory is of arriving in an Austrian mountain village in 1902 at about 4 years of age. His mother has died from tuberculosis and the only reason Andreas is allowed to stay with his uncle, farmer Hubert Kranzstocker, is because money comes with the boy. Andreas’ second memory is of being 8 years of age and beaten so badly by his uncle that his thigh is broken. After the bonesetter comes, Andreas spends 6 weeks lying down in the attic on a straw mattress. He limps for the rest of his life. Andreas rebels against his uncle's violence and begins his adult life at 18 by taking on casual labouring jobs. Andreas goes on to survive the devastating loss of his wife, 8 years in a prison of war camp in Russia, and the swarm of tourists to the village. Towards the end of his life, Andreas concludes that he has led a good life. External Website

Academic Articles Review: Making Home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels. Wade Bell 2014 In this article, Wade Bell from the University of Gothenburg reviews Making Home: Making Home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels. He begins by talking of the orphan stories that informed his growing up in the US when Ronald Reagan was president and states that “Although the orphan figure is not unique to North America, it really seems to hold a special place there…” Bell is enthusiastic about Making Home and concludes that the book “seems to find one commonality that might even help explain the orphan figure’s prominence in American narratives”. That being, that “Figuratively speaking, America is a land of orphans, all looking to make a new kind of home in a land marked by difference, conflict, and change. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles A Conversation about Tracy Beaker... Rosie Canning 2018 Back in early 2018, Rosie Canning started a conversation on Social Media about Tracy Beaker which kick-started a whole negative portrayals conversation and led to conversations with Jacqueline Wilson, the author. 'There are already a huge amount of negative care stereotypes in fiction, an over-abundance of kids from care or adopted who become serial killers in crime fiction. If writers must use ‘other’, then carrying out impeccable research and making a story believable, rather than lazy use of a stereotype, is a must.' Read the exciting follow-up to this conversation here. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir A Tribute to Daphne David Jackson 2011 Recipes for Survival: Stories of Hope and Healing by Survivors of the State ‘Care’ System in Australia is a collection of stories by those who have grown up in care in Australia during the 20th century and is therefore contribution to a growing body of literature on the experiences of the Forgotten Australians. External Website

Authors W We Don't Know Ourselves. A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 ➝ What Happened to You? ➝ Thomas Coram, Gent.: 1668-1751 ➝ The State of It ➝ Back to Top

Authors E Barry Evans ➝ Back to Top

Biography of Care Experienced People The Berlin Shadow Jonathan Lichtenstein 2020 In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein’s father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. As Hans enters old age, he and his son Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin. Published to coincide with the eightieth anniversary, this is a highly compelling account of a father and son’s attempt to emerge from the shadows of history. External Website

Authors D A Second Life ➝ Family likeness ➝ Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade ➝ Sanctuary ➝ Cloud Cuckoo Land ➝ Solace of the Road ➝ Ignoring Gravity ➝ The Ghost of Lily Painter ➝ The Inheritance of Loss ➝ The Way It Is Now ➝ Akin ➝ Bodies of Light ➝ The Last Thing He Told Me ➝ Moll Flanders ➝ The Language of Flowers ➝ The Sunken Road ➝ The Tearsmith (Novel) ➝ Died in the Wool ➝ Back to Top

Authors X The Autobiography of Malcolm X ➝ Back to Top