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Alexander Urbanek

Born and raised beneath Laurin’s Rose Garden in the shadow of the Alps, the stories of Otfried Preußler, Michael Ende, Charles Dickens, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and Mervin Peake inevitably instilled in Alexander Urbanek a pronounced fondness for fairy tales and fantasy art. Books were portals to these worlds of fantasy, which expand and enrich our reality with so many tones, colors, and facets. While satisfying his hunger for literature, he began drawing at an early age, initially for his own pleasure, but eventually also for friends who admired his pictures, as an illustrator for several magazines, and to create detailed illustrations for a fantasy novella. His pencil drawings were created using a Renaissance technique that is mostly forgotten today, called Schimmern, which is capable of depicting structures and surfaces with an almost exaggerated photorealistic clarity. An eight-page article entitled “The Magical Art of Alexander Urbanek” appeared in a magazine in Berlin. His pictures also attracted interest at his exhibition at the 3rd Congress of Fantasy in Passau in 1992, especially that of Otfried Preußler, who was honored there for his literary work. This fortunate encounter with the unique author Preußler, who still spelled “Fantasy with a Ph” and who, in conversation with a visitor to the picture exhibition—also an exhibitor and guest of fantasy author Hugh Walker—described Alexander Urbanek as a “really extremely interesting young man,” is thus at least partly responsible for a partnership and marriage that has lasted over 30 years. During a visit to Burghausen, a friendly coincidence led to a personal acquaintance with Frederick Hetman, the great German writer and biographer who was intensively involved in collecting, translating, and publishing fairy tales, myths, and legends from all parts of the world. The long and intense conversations during a meal together continued in a lively exchange of letters. Alexander Urbanek says that it is a great stroke of luck when one’s own lifetime coincides with that of such personalities whose works one greatly admires, and especially when one has the opportunity to meet them and even exchange ideas with them directly, as was the case in successive years at the Science Fiction Days NRW with, for example, Brian Aldiss, Diane Duane, Alan Dean Foster, and repeatedly with Sir Terry Pratchett, one of the most brilliant storytellers, who was no less surprising, fascinating, and inspiring in spontaneous conversation than in his novels. Most writers start out as avid readers. Alexander Urbanek self-published his first fantasy novella, Das Lied der Stadt (“The Song of the City”), a piece of Urban Fantasy set in the Ruhr region. Two further German-language novels are as yet unpublished. Through founding the Dice & Mystics gaming club, organizing local and international gaming events, his long experience as a role-playing DM, and his general involvement with board and role-playing games, he developed a career with publishers as a lector and editor of a wide variety of texts from rulebooks and accompanying narratives, to worldbuilding and writing D&D adventures and novels, which has long since become his main source of income: “Nothing is better than living from and with what you love most!” His first work in English, Shifting Runes, was initially written spontaneously as a single short story to entertain fellow backers of the Swedish role-playing game Trudvang on Kickstarter. It was so enthusiastically received that, in the style of “Flying Leaves,” chapter by chapter, which the publisher, at the request of the fans, promptly provided with a cover image and published, immediately followed by the commission to write the first role-playing adventure in English for Trudvang – in the Trudvang Chronicles system and also for D&D 5e. It was published in 2022 under the title “The Elven Road.” Alexander Urbanek now has a bibliography of over 20 titles – in English and German – as editor, co-author, and sole author. He is listed as an author and game designer on BoardGameGeek and has been a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association since 2025.