But for Emma Pei Yin, the road from good daughter to free spirit wasn't so straightforward.

The Canberra author and editor has just signed a six-figure book publishing deal after her debut novel sparked a cross-continental bidding war.

She had to migrate across the world and find a new home to achieve her dream.

But she maintains she still has "a little bit of imposter syndrome. When your dreams actually, finally, come true, and you're like, 'Is this real'?"

Born and bred in the United Kingdom, Pei Yin moved with her family to Hong Kong when she was 15.

By the time she was 20, she had decided to move away, and posters of Australia appealed the most.

She picked Canberra because she had just enough money saved up to do an advanced diploma, and CIT offered one in public relations.

She had already given up on her dream of writing, after being accepted into a three-year script-writing course at the London campus of the New York Film Academy.

"My parents were very strict," she says.

"They were like, 'You can't pursue the arts. There's no money in the arts. You won't get anywhere'.

"And I thought, 'OK. It's one of those stories'. So I ended up in Canberra. I did what my parents wanted me to do."

Well, she got halfway there. Despite a distinct lack of tourist-brochure palm trees, Canberra turned out to be just the place for her.

"[My parents] wanted me to get into public relations and marketing because my dad thought that after that I'd go back to Hong Kong and I'd kind of run the business with him, but it never quite happened because honestly, I really ended up liking Canberra. It's so beautiful here," she says.

It had been hard, she says, to give up on her dreams to please her parents, but when she eventually became an Australian citizen in 2016, her perspective shifted.

She enrolled, at the age of 32, in a creative writing course at Curtin University through Open Universities Australia.

"After my writing degree, I thought, you know what, I'm going to ignore what my parents have been kind of drilling into me for the past how many years. I'm going to pursue my dream," she says.

"I just started writing, and I haven't stopped since."

She settled on historical fiction, and set her first novel, When Sleeping Women Wake, in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation in 1940.

"[The period] is not really spoken about much," she says.

"You also don't get to see it that often in literature, especially literature in Australia, or the UK in the Western markets.

"So you've got a mother, a daughter and their maid, and they all get separated when Japanese forces break into Hong Kong.

"They basically have to work very hard to survive and find their way back to each other again, and one of them ends up joining the resistance movement as well."

She was inspired by the stories her grandparents, of Hakka and Punti heritage, had told her growing up.

"I think the key thing was my granddad spoke a lot about the resistance movement and the Japanese occupation ... and my grandma would just be so quiet, she just never wanted to talk about it," she recalls.

"And I thought, 'OK, well, what's her story'?

"And I think over the years, I really just wanted to write something and kind of give her a voice, because I never heard it."

She wrote a complete draft and sent it off to an agent in the UK. Within weeks, she was hearing from publishers.

The book sparked a bidding war that has ended with a joint acquisition between Hachette Australia and Quercus UK, as well as Ballantine in the US and Garzanti in Italy.

Pei Yin says she was taken aback by all the interest.

"I knew it was going to reach audiences eventually," she says.

"I had faith in the story, because I've got faith in the characters that I've created. I wasn't really expecting it to go to auction."