The Truth Behind Care Life

The clock on the wall has a plastic face,

An ear aching hum in a borrowed space,

I perch on the edge of a fire-rated bed,

Counting the things that go unsaid,

In the office, the pens begin to scratch,

Recording the “mood” they try to catch,

They note my silence as “low engagement”,

A line of text in my permanent placement,

How do I explain that the wall feels thin,

While the weight of the world is caving in?

That my “challenging behaviour” is just a scream,

For a life that doesn’t feel like a fever dream,

I am a collection of symptoms and “needs”,

A garden of trauma and tangled weeds.

But when the night staff do their hourly checks,

They see a sleeping form, not the wreck.

They give me a pill and a cup of tea,

But nobody sits and just looks at me.

I’m a file to be managed, a box to be ticked,

A spirit that’s tired of being predicted.

The pain isn’t “risk” and it isn’t a “phase”,

It’s the ghost of a home in a permanent haze,

I’m drowning in papers, in rotas and charts,

While no body measures the break in our hearts.

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The Orwell Youth Prize uses the writing of George Orwell to inspire young people aged 11-18 to write bravely and creatively about their own ideas and experiences. This year’s winning entries, selected by judges Nandana Sen, James Bloodworth, and Sophia Smith Galer from an original list of more than 1,300 entries, were announced at University College London by George Orwell’s son, Richard Blair. Their writing, published digitally in full with The Observer for the first time, ranges from intimate personal reflection to engagements with issues of censorship, propaganda and resistance.

George Orwell wrote regularly for The Observer and its former editor David Astor was among his closest friends and most important supporters. But this is also a forward-looking partnership, rooted in a shared commitment to nurturing the next generation of talented journalists. Entries for the new prize cycle will open, with a new theme, in autumn 2026, and everyone who enters before February 2027 will receive free personalised feedback on their writing. 

Photograph by Landmark Media/Alamy