Sure, it was a beautiful land with glorious beaches and magnificent weather, but, culturally, it could feel like a desert.

Instead, across the blue water of the Pacific Ocean, the ‘real world’ beckoned … luring Coast creatives to places like England and America, where they could become a ‘true’ artist or author or actor.

This was a city where you started or finished, maybe even both.

Everything else happened elsewhere.

But now, the Gold Coast has something to say.

And that’s the very reason that, after 20 years away, international best-selling author Holly Ringland has come home to stay.

Neither at the beginning nor end of her career, she has made the city her base for what is set to be her prime.

Just seven years ago she published her first novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, to critical acclaim and commercial success. It was published in 30 territories, won the Australian Book Industry Award General Fiction Book of the Year in 2019 and in 2023 debuted on Prime Video as a seven-episode series, starring Oscar-winner Sigourney Weaver.

The series broke records with the biggest opening weekend viewership globally for any Australian launch and reached the top five in 78 countries, and top three in 42 countries.

While she wrote her debut in the UK, a place she felt she had to go to truly be a ‘writer’, the pandemic meant a brief visit in 2019 turned into a years-long unexpected migration.

She and partner Sam Harris ended up living with her mum and stepfather in the Hinterland, where she wrote her second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, which was published in 2022 and became another bestseller – now also rumoured to be adapted for the screen.

In 2023, she published her first non-fiction book, The House that Joy Built, also written on the Coast, which was described as a ‘non-fiction masterpiece’.

Now, she has truly invested in her Gold Coast roots. Purchasing a house in the city’s southern suburbs where she is hard at work on her third novel – with the city already a worthy inspiration.

“This is my first true homecoming novel, which is incredibly powerful and really dear to me,” said Holly, who moved to the Gold Coast at age four.

“For me, so much of the rite of passage of growing up was about leaving home. You had to leave the Gold Coast to leave who you were and find out who you are.

“Now, at last, I no longer feel like I need to be away … I can be home and be myself. I’ve grown up and the Gold Coast has grown up.

“I grew up here dreaming of being a writer, now to come home and be living that dream … I’m still processing it.

“When I think back to being 16 as a student at Coombabah High, I couldn’t imagine in my wildest dreams that there could be a woman from the Gold Coast, living on the Gold Coast, who found the courage to be a writer, let alone be a successful writer.

“To think that I could be that person for kids on the Gold Coast today is just bewildering to me … it’s almost as hard to process as Sigourney Weaver playing a character that I wrote. I will never take either for granted.”

Holly said she was fascinated to see a wave of southeast Queensland writers, such as Trent Dalton and Kate Morton, connecting with readers around the world.

She said local authors were overcoming their own form of cultural cringe, while readers recognised that the region had something to say.

“Stories are how we make sense of things, and we’re making sense of who we are as people, as a city and as a country,” she said.

“Those stories are both universal in their themes, but also from a really unique perspective of a booming city that’s at the edge of the world.

“We are writing about how life feels in this region, not at arm’s length but from the centre of our chest.

“There is so much to say because the Gold Coast is a different world now. Back when I was at uni here, working at a cafe in Main Beach, the Indy was the highlight – and that was not necessarily a pleasant experience.

“Now things are really happening right here – films, books, art.

“The city has a real magnetism. Even with all of the development and change and growth, it has the stability of its incredible natural environment combined with that sense of community.”

Holly said she was given the confidence to leave the Gold Coast and pursue her dream to be a writer by two people who were still residents – her mother and her high school English teacher.

She said she first travelled to Canada on a working visa, then moved to the Northern Territory to work as a park ranger, before finally relocating to Manchester in the UK.

“My mum and my English teacher, Mr Scott Ham who still teaches on the Gold Coast, were the ones who believed in me enough to finally make myself believe in me,” she said.

“But I felt I had to leave here, in part because I couldn’t see how what I wanted was possible back then.

“The other reason I left was to recover my life from violent relationships with men. I needed to rebuild myself and follow my dream. But it was not easy.

“I was doing a masters in creative writing at Manchester which gave me an anchor and some structure because I was so afraid to try doing this thing I had been dreaming of since I was three years old.

“There was also a death in my family and that bereavement had me coming up against the rage of my own procrastination. I was so sick to my stomach of not doing what I loved, I was pissed off at my own fear.

“So one day I begged myself to just give myself 10 minutes away from the noise of my brain. To take just 10 minutes at my desk and actually write. And in that 10 minutes, the words were almost spoken into my brain, and I wrote the first sentences of what would be The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.

“That cracked the dam wall, that was the catalyst, but it didn’t necessarily get easy after that.

“It was two and a half years of writing and was the hardest work I’ve ever done.

“The success I had with it was down to luck and timing in many ways, but luck and timing mean nothing without the hard work.”

That experience, as well as her reflection on so many who feel their own cultural or creative cringe, inspired her to write her non-fiction book The House that Joy Built, as well the recent launch of her Substack The Joy Rise, where she said readers could share what they loved about creating without shame.

As well as her multiple works in progress, Holly said she added a significant new chapter to her own life when she returned to her UK home last year.

Five years after leaving Manchester with just a small suitcase, expecting to return within weeks, she said it was incredibly emotional, but the perfect bookend.

“Walking back into my old place was like returning to a time capsule,” she said.

“All of the books I was reading at the time were still sitting on my nightstand, and on my desk was a note I’d written to myself as encouragement to get started on my second book, the Seven Skins of Esther Wilding.

“Now here I was with that book published and toured, a non-fiction book published, and already working on my next novel. It was like meeting my past self, and just feeling so proud of her.

“It also was the final realisation that I was done with that life. That Australia and the Gold Coast were where I wanted and needed to be.

“It’s a privilege to be able to return home, it’s something that so many people can never do.

“But I also know that the Gold Coast has ruined me. Nowhere else on earth can compare.

“There is a connection to this city that so many feel. It reminds me of when I was filming the series Back to Nature for the ABC, and the traditional custodians explained to us that once you love a place or a landscape, once it’s part of you, it will always call you back.

“The Gold Coast called me home.”