Lee Cheong-jun was born in Jinmok-ri, Hoejin-myeon, Jangheung, and left behind a body of work including a connected series of stories centered on namdo-chang, the traditional narrative singing of southern Korea, most notably "The Wanderer of Seonhak-dong." The novel was later adapted into the film The Thousand-Year Crane.
The southern songs he must have absorbed naturally as a child growing up in the village later became fiction under this writer's hand. The landscape and sound of Hoejin-myeon, where he was born and raised, are woven throughout his work as its recurring backdrop, and readers today can still walk to the real places behind his fictional scenes.