Biography      My first attempts at writing fiction date back to the late Sixties and some fan stories in the early Seventies, when I was an active member of German fantasy fandom. After that, I started doing translations and writing criticism and studies. At some time, I felt that I had said every- thing about the subject I could possibly say from my point of view, and that it might be worth a try putting it into practice. The result were five fantasy novels, three of them for young adult and two for general readers, partly written in collaboration with a friend, Horst von Allwörden. Later, I took up doing translations again – among else, I have been involved, with a team of colleagues, in a spectacular two-week event translating Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol into German (photo) – and have also taken up my scholarly research to a certain extent. Although in recent times I have also been thinking of writing another novel ... My academic interest is in the theory of the fantastic and in the typology of literary genres. I have also done some research on J.R.R. Tolkien and accumulated a private collection about this writer and his work. I edited a critical anthology, ‘J. R. R. Tolkien: The Mythmaker’ (1984), at a time when there were few academic sourcebooks on Tolkien’s work in German, and a book of lectures and essays of my own, ‘The Light of Middle-earth’ (1994). After polishing my skills on various fantasy classics and a seminal study on Tolkien, Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth, I eventually got a chance of translating a book by the master himself, The Children of Húrin (2007). My studies on Tolkien’s Elven languages, published in two bestselling books named ‘Elvish’, vols. 1 and 2 (2003/2004), were revised and updated in ‘The Book of Elvish’ (2008), a trade paperback running to some nine hundred pages in print.   In my spare time, if any, I doodle along drawing maps for fantasy and historical novels, designing fonts, and painting miniature figures. From my time in Scotland as as student, I have retained a fondness for all things Celtic, including music and a decent single malt. I am also an alumnus of a traditional students’ society, and chairman of the board of its student’s hostel. Not to mention the fact that I have been married for more than thirty years now, have a grown-up daughter and live on the outskirts of Cologne.   »Fantasy is a journey into the subconscious mind. ... It can be dangerous, and it will change you.« Ursula K. Le Guin Photo by Olivier Favre Kevelaer in the Lower English Language and My doctoral dissertation on study of this subject in (among else, for the novels editor, and a novelist.       Born on 30 August, 1952, in Mönchengladbach (photo), I grew up in the town of  Rhine area. After school and a community year in lieu of military service, I studied  Literature, History of Art and Classical Archaeology at Cologne and Glasgow/UK.  ‘Fantasy: Theory and History of a Literary Genre’  in 1981 was the first full-length  Germany. In this genre, in particular, I am known as an illustrator, a cartographer  of David Eddings), a translator, literary scholar and linguist, a Tolkien expert, an    After several years as a lecturer in English Language and Language Teaching at Cologne University, I joined the Bastei magazine publishing house as an SF and fantasy editor. In 1987, I moved over to its sister company, Lübbe Verlag (now merged to Bastei Lübbe) as a general fiction editor. Among the books I published are editions of David Baldacci, Marion Zimmer Bradley, David Eddings, Ken Follett, Stephen King, Stephen R. Lawhead, James A. Michener and James Patterson, as well as German writers such as Wolfgang Hohlbein (photo). In October, 2011, I joined the newly founded Bastei Entertainment division as a digital media editor.