Parv was unafraid to experiment, enjoining aspiring authors to “ write dangerously” rather than to satisfy the market, and often hybridised genres in her work. She is the only Australian recipient of the Romantic Times Book Reviews Pioneer award, which honours those who have broken new ground in the development of the romance novel. In addition to writing romance, Parv also wrote science fiction novels and a number of non-fiction works. “Not when people and their stories are so varied.” Romance, and aliens “All fiction has conventions but formula, hardly,” she wrote earlier this month. Parv, however, firmly rejected this notion. This is especially true for category romance fiction, as publisher guidelines can dictate things like length, setting and level of sexual content. Romance fiction is often derided as formulaic. With these books, she was primarily working in the genre known as category romance - most frequently associated with Mills & Boon in Australia, and sold in print at discount department stores like Kmart, Big W and Target. Parv went on to write 56 more romances across various Harlequin imprints. This was, as Parv noted, a book which “broke a few moulds at the time”, featuring a widowed single mother heroine dealing with the fallout of her late husband’s PTSD-induced gambling addiction. Her first romance novel, Love’s Greatest Gamble, was published by Harlequin Mills & Boon in 1982. In the 1980s, she began to publish in the genre she was most well-known for: romance fiction. She began as an advertising copywriter, and her first books, non-fiction home and garden DIY guides, were published in the late 1970s.
Valerie Parv passed away suddenly last weekend, a week before her 70th birthday. She published more than 70 novels and sold more than 34 million books translated into 29 languages, making her one of Australia’s most successful and prolific authors.
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