Lee Yeongdo

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-30

Lee Yeongdo is a South Korean fantasy writer born in 1972 in Busan, who moved to Masan at age two and attended Kyungnam University, where he studied Korean language and literature starting in 1991. He began writing seriously in 1993 and rose to prominence by serializing his debut novel, Dragon Raja, on the early Korean online service Hitel from October 1997 to April 1998, where it drew approximately 900,000 hits before being published in twelve volumes starting in May 1998 by Golden Bough. Dragon Raja went on to sell around two million copies across four languages and is credited with helping legitimize fantasy as a serious literary genre within Korean publishing. Lee's other major works include Future Walker (1999), Polaris Rhapsody (2001), The Bird That Drinks Tears (2003), and The Bird That Drinks Blood (2005), several of which have been translated into English. He is regarded as one of the best-selling and most influential fantasy writers in Korea, having published around forty books over roughly seven years at points in his career, sometimes writing as much as twenty-nine pages a day. He values direct reader feedback from serialized online publication and helps at his parents' persimmon farm.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Heart of the Nhaga (2026) · The Bird That Drinks Tears Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 1 (1 nomination)

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