Hyeonseo Lee

Hyeonseo Lee is a North Korean refugee living in Seoul, South Korea. She is a Young Leader at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has a degree in English and Chinese from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and spends much of her time speaking about North Korean human rights and refugee issues.

Her 2013 TED talk has received over 11 million views to date (as of September 2018) and received a positive response. Hyeonseo has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, LSE Big Ideas blog, and for the South Korean Ministry of Unification.

Her memoir, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story, was published in English in July 2015 and has gone on to become an international bestseller, with over a million copies sold around the world, in 22 different languages so far, and counting.