Fiction featuring Care Experience The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai 2006 The Inheritance of Loss (2006) by Indian writer Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006. Set in 1986, the novel centres around 2 characters: Biju & Sai. Sai was orphaned as a 6-year-old. At the time she was living in a convent school in Russia. After her parents died in an accident, the child was sent to live with her maternal grandfather, retired judge Jemubhai Patel, in Kalimpong a town in West Bengal, India. Sai’s father had also been an orphan. Biju is living in the US during most of the novel. His father is the cook for Sai’s grandfather and since he lives on the ground’s of Jemubhai Patel’s house, Biju lived with his grandmother while growing up. The central theme in The Inheritance of Loss is the effect of colonialism and the way a sense of loss travels down through the generations. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Orphan's Tale Pam Jenoff 2017 In Nazi-occupied Holland, seventeen-year-old Noa snatches a baby from a train bound for the concentration camps, fleeing with him into the snowy wilderness surrounding the train tracks. Passing through the woods is a German circus, led by the heroic Herr Neuhoff. They agree to take in Noa and the baby, on one condition: to earn her keep, Noa must master the flying trapeze – under the tutorage of mysterious aerialist, Astrid.Soaring high above the crowds, Noa and Astrid must learn to trust one another…or plummet. But with the threat of war closing in, loyalty can become the most dangerous trait of all. External Website

Television Shows The Chestnut Man 2021 The Chestnut Man is a 6-part Danish crime thriller which opens with the murder of a family in 1987. There are foster children in the family who are not killed. More than 30 years later, detectives investigate the brutal murder of a young woman whose son is now in the foster care system. As the series proceeds we find out that one man has decided the child protection system is inadequate and he has become a vigilante on behalf of neglected children. External Website

Writers Langston Hughes 1901-1967 James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. Hughes was born in Missouri. His father abandoned the family soon after the birth. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his maternal grandmother in Kansas as his mother needed to travel for work. When his grandmother died, Hughes lived with family friends for 2 years. Eventually Hughes lived again with his mother after she remarried and settled in Cleveland. There he wrote for his high school newspaper and published his first poetry. One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue." In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays, and short stories. He also published several non-fiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Women Who Raised Me Victoria Rowell 2007 The Women Who Raised Me is the remarkable story of Victoria Rowell's jouney out of the foster care system to attain the American Dream--and of the unlikely series of women who lifted, motivated, and inspired her along the way. From Agatha Armstead--a black Bostonian who was Victoria's longest-term foster mother and first noticed her spark of creativity and talent--to Esther Brooks, a Paris-trained prima ballerina who would become her first mentor at the Cambridge School of Ballet--The Women Who Raised Me is a loving, vivid portrait of all the women who would help Victoria transition out of foster care and into New York City's wild worlds of ballet, acting, and adulthood. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir True Crime: A Memoir Patricia Cornwell 2026 American crime writer, Patricia Cornwell, was in foster care as a child.She has recently written about this experience in her memoir, True Crime. She writes about her difficult childhood leading up to & including the time spent in foster care with a woman she experienced as abusive. True Crime also covers Cornwell’s career as a police reporter, in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia & the development of her forensic pathologist, Dr Kay Scarpetta (now adapted for screen with Scarpetta played by Nicole Kidman) External Website

Television Shows The Salisbury Poisonings 2020 The Salisbury Poisonings (2020) is a docudrama based on the 2018 poisoning by nerve agent of Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent and his daughter, Ulia Skripal, in the City of Salisbury England. The Skripal poisonings resulted in a police officer - Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall) - being poisoned, and later, a couple - Dawn Sturgess (MyAnna Buring) and Charlie Rowley (Johnny Harris) - who found the perfume bottle containing the nerve agent and applied it to themselves. According to the series, Dawn Sturgess' daughter is in kinship care with her grandparents, Caroline (Stella Gonet) and Stan Sturgess (Ron Cook). In a 2020 Guardian article, Caroline and Stan Sturgess say they cooperated with the making of the series because they were unhappy with the way that Dawn had been represented in the media "as a hopeless addict". https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/31/she-never-had-a-voice-dawn-sturgess-parents-hope-tv-drama-bbc-salisbury-poisonings-novichok External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience War Horse Michael Morpurgo 1982 War Horse (1982) is a novel by British writer Michael Morpurgo. It tells the story of a horse called Joey who is bought by the army for service in WWI France and the efforts of his previous owner, 15 year old Albert, to bring Joey home safely. One character in the novel is orphaned Emilie who lives on a farm near the front lines. At a time when Joey and another horse, Topthorn, are being used to by the Germans to pull an ambulance, the Germans allow Emilie and her grandfather to care for them. After the Germans relocate their hospital, Emilie and her grandfather are allowed to keep the horses. For a while anyway. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Dutch House Ann Patchett 2019 A richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House belongs to a tradition in both fairy tales and American fiction of motherless children (sometimes raised by their father, often with the aid of an aunt or trusty hired help) Two siblings, Maeve and Danny Conroy, bond tightly after their mother leaves home when they're 10 and 3. Home is the eponymous Dutch House, a 1922 mansion outside Philadelphia that their father, Cyril, a real estate mogul, bought fully furnished in an estate sale as a surprise for his wife in 1946, when Maeve was 5. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. External Website

Radio & Podcast The Bed Under the Stairs Lemn Sissay 2016 Lemn Sissay talking about his experience in foster care and comparing his life to that of fictional character Harry Potter. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Round House Louise Erdrich 2016 A mother is brutally raped by a man on their North Dakota reservation where she lives with her husband and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. Traumatized and afraid, she takes to her bed and refuses to talk to anyone - including the police. While her husband, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts, young Joe's world shifts on its child's axis. Confused, and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out to find answers that might put his mother's attacker behind bars - and make everything right again. Or so he hopes. An important aspect of The Round House is an adoption story, the story of a white woman who grows up in Native America after she is rejected at birth by her mother. External Website

Television Shows House of Gods 2024 House of Gods (2024) is an Australian television drama and tells the story of a Muslim Australian community in the suburb of Fairfield, Sydney, NSW. At the centre of the story is Sheikh Mohammad (Kamel El Basha) who is vying to be the head of the mosque. He is regarded as a progressive imam whereas his competition is a conservative one. One member of Sheikh Mohammad’s family, his son Isa, was adopted from an orphanage in Iraq. Isa is played by Osamah Sami who is co-creator and one of the writers on the series. Apparently, Sami grew up as the son of a progressive Imam. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Inconvenient Child: An Abandoned Australian Child Struggles to Survive and Find her American Father Sharyn Lewis Killens et al. 2009 It is 1948, Sydney, Australia. Pretty, blonde Grace discovers she is pregnant to a black merchant marine who has sailed back to America. The White Australia Policy is in place and society's judgment matters; so what will Grace do with this baby? Rescued from neglectful foster care by an American champion boxer, the baby is taken to live in a party house in Sydney's red light district of Kings Cross. Her absent, elegant mother then abandons Sharyn in a convent-orphanage, at age five. By fifteen, discrimination within her family, resentment and clashes over her father's undisclosed identity see the troubled teenager running away to the streets of Kings Cross where she's arrested and sentenced to notorious juvenile detention centers. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Woman in the Window A J Finn 2019 What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.Twisty and powerful, ingenious and moving, The Woman in the Window is a smart, sophisticated novel of psychological suspense that recalls the best of Hitchcock and features an adopted teenage boy. External Website

Radio & Podcast The Children of Morelia Destry Maria Sibley 2021 Nearly a century ago, hundreds of children were sent from war-torn Spain to a Mexican orphanage. At just three years old, Rosita Daroca Martinez was the youngest of those refugees. In this week’s show, her granddaughter, the writer and radio producer Destry Maria Sibley, traces the impact that her grandmother’s trauma had on subsequent generations of her family. The immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer ties that story to the current refugee crisis, and talks about how the surge at the border has put the Biden Administration on its heels. Plus, Jelani Cobb, who covered George Floyd’s killing and the protests that followed, on whether the conviction of Derek Chauvin on all charges will lead to greater police accountability. External Website

Television Shows Orphan Black (TV Series) 2013 Orphan Black (2013) is a Canadian sci-fi thriller series which ran for 5 series. Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) was born in Bristol, England and raised in foster care. Her foster family relocated to Toronto during her childhood. Sarah discovers that she is one of several genetically identical human clones, some of whom grew up in nuclear family situations, some of whom – like Sarah – did not. With her foster brother, Felix Dawkins (Jordan Gavaris) and 2 others clones, Alison and Cosima, Sarah discovers the Neolution scientific movement which is responsible for the clones, including monitoring them as they go about their lives. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Paid for: My Journey Through Prostitution Rachel Moran 2013 When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell. Rachel Moran came from a troubled family background. Taken into State care at fourteen, she became homeless and got involved in prostitution aged fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel worked as a prostitute, isolated, drug-addicted, outside of society. Rachel s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world. At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran s story, written in her own words and in her own name. External Website

Fiction by Care Experienced authors Borrowed Body Mason Valerie John 2013 “I could have been born and raised in Africa. But my Spirit was in too much of a rush to be reincarnated…At six weeks I was chucked out into the new year of 1965 which wasn’t prepared to welcome an African baby, abandoned on a harsh English winter’s day.” So begins Pauline’s spirited and moving story of her childhood and teenage years in and out of foster homes and back and forth to Dr. Barnardo’s Village in Essex. The Barnardo’s good times are shattered by the sudden visits of her mother, whom she calls Wunmi and with whom she goes to live in a London high-rise. Wunmi’s method of refashioning Pauline into a dutiful African child is literally to knock the English out of her. Pauline tries other ways to survive—sniffing glue and shoplifting—until the harsh realities of detention centres and juvenile courts make Pauline think again… External Website

Writers René Descartes 1596-1650 René Descartes (1596 – 1650) was a French-born philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who spent a large portion of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. René was born into a well-off legal family, originally from the Poitou region of France. His father, Joachim Descartes, spent six months of the year 260 kilometres away in Rennes at the Parliament of Brittany and was absent from home when René was born. Rene’s mother, Jeanne Brochard, gave birth to René at her mother’s home and died fourteen months later. With his father absent for half the year, René (and his siblings), were left in the care of his maternal grandmother and wet-nurse. Biographer Desmond Clarke believes this arrangement continued for at least two years, and the children then moved between grandmother and father until Rene was four. From 1600 René then lived with the grandmother until her death around 1609, after which René spent school holidays with his godfather, Michel Ferrand, or with his paternal grandmother. Rene began his formal education at a Jesuit school, La Fleche College, 160 kilometres from home. René was at La Fleche from approximately 1607 until 1616, by which time he was 19 years old. René Descartes went on to become one of the most influential philosophers of his time; he is sometimes regarded as the “parent of modern philosophy”. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Collective Revenge: Challenging the Individualist Victim-Avenger in Death Proof, Sleepers, and Mystic River Claire Henry 2014 In this book, Revisionist Rape-Revenge Redefining a Film Genre, Claire Henry examines what’s at play – including politics & ethics – when films include rape. One of the 3 films Henry examines is Sleepers (1996), which tells the story of 4 young boys being sent to a juvenile detention centre in the 1960s where they are brutalised by guards. Years later, the men seek revenge which ends in a courtroom battle. External Website