Hye Seon Oh is a South Korean writer and a North Korean defector from North Hamgyong Province along with her diplomat husband.
Her book The Pyongyang Lady from London is the memoir of the wife of a former North Korean diplomat who became a South Korean Congressman
Hye was born as the daughter of the anti-Japanese partisan family, one of the best in North Korea who spent her childhood in opulence. Her grandparents were the close comrades of Kim Il Sung, former President of North Korea. In 1989, before graduating from Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, she met her husband, Yongho Tae and they married in October of that year.
The following year, her first son was born. She moved to Denmark in April 1996 when her husband was appointed third secretary at the North Korean Embassy in Denmark, where she gave birth to her second son. Afterwards, she lived abroad in Denmark and Sweden and returned to Pyongyang after four-and-a-half years.
In 2004, her husband was again assigned to the North Korean Embassy in the UK and lived in London. In 2008, she returned to Pyongyang again. In 2013, she began her second life in London when her husband was appointed as the deputy Ambassador of North Korea to the UK. She then defected with her husband and their two sons to South Korea in the summer of 2016.
After defection to South Korea, she completed her postgraduate degree from Ewha Womans University in 2021.
