All About Women, the annual festival of women at the Sydney Opera House, has invited a North Korean defector and activist Hyeonseo Lee to its International Women's Day events to explore her ordeal.
As a child, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country- North Korea- was the best on the planet. It wasn't until the devastating famine of the 1990s that she began to question those beliefs and look for an escape route.
As a teenager, she fled to China to stay with distant relatives and spent the next ten years hiding her true identity before finally escaping to South Korea.
She then made the courageous decision to return to the North Korean border in a daring mission to bring the rest of her family to safety.
Hyeonseo Lee spoke about her experiences at a TED conference in Long Beach, California, in February 2013, bringing about the international attention to the heinous North Korean human rights abuse.
Her memoir The Girl with Seven Names was published in July 2015 to reveal the details of her extraordinary ordeal.
She speaks to SBS Radio Korean Program.
