The daughter of John Lile Lewis and Elizabeth Christina Forsyth, Letitia Evelyn Parr attended Crows Nest Primary School and North Sydney Girls High School and worked as a stenographer until she married Harold George Parr, an optometrist, in 1927. They had three children. Parr was prominent in the Christian Education Home Correspondence Sunday School and was its organising secretary 1964-1968. In retirement she helped to establish a free library locally and worked in after-school care at the local primary school.
Parr became a writer late in life. Much of her poetry was first published in the NSW School Magazine. The first of Letitia Parr's books for children, the internationally acclaimed Green Is for Growing, was published in 1968 when she was sixty-two and already a grandmother. Her last, Birds Fly, a selection of her poems, was published just before her death. Letitia Parr was a widow for many years and brought up her children alone. She was a campaigner for justice and against prejudice. She fought a long battle with an American company, Scroll Press, over the royalties for one of her books, When Sea and Sky Are Blue (1970). Another work, Green Is for Growing (1968), was included in 'Best of the Best' by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's International Youth Library, (1969).
Patricia Lovell (q.v.), the Australian film producer, is one of her three children.
(Source: 'Letitia (Evelyn) Parr 1906-', Contemporary Authors 103 (1982): 387; Reading Time, July 1986 pp7-9)
