Phantopia presents: Reading with BORIS KOCH

Reading with Boris Krug

Boris Koch, born on a winter’s night in 1973, grew up in the countryside of Bavarian Swabia. After completing his civilian service in a children’s psychiatric clinic, he studied ancient history and modern German literature with alternating minors in Munich, dropping out of both courses.
In 2000, he moved to Berlin, where, among other things, he worked for several years at the Otherland bookstore and founded the fantastic reading stage Das StirnhirnhinterZimmer with Christian von Aster and Markolf Hoffmann, which lasted ten years. Since spring 2015, he has been living in Leipzig as a freelance author with the author Kathleen Weise and their daughter, writing for young people and adults, fantastic and realistic, longer and shorter. Occasionally he also writes comic stories.
He received numerous nominations and awards. For the youth thriller Fire in the Blood, he received the renowned Hansjörg Martin Award, Four bags of ash was collected from the German Academy for Children’s and Youth Literature as Book of the Month, Das Kaninchenrennen (The Rabbit Race ) and Die Mondschatzjäger (The Moon Treasure Hunters ) both landed on the Münchner Bücherschau ‘s Die 100 Besten (The 100 Best ) list, and in 2023 he and illustrator Frauke Berger won the Krefeld Prize for Fantastic Literature for the first volume of the comic series Das Schiff der verlorenen Kinder (The Ship of Lost Children ).

“Bog Runner – In the Realm of the Last Dragon“

Beware of the beast in the moor – and the night in the hearts of men
Dark, mysterious and highly atmospheric, Boris Koch’s fantasy novel “Moorläufer. In the realm of the last dragon” about will-o’-the-wisps, guilt and the monster in the bog.

Only in the vast misty black bogs at the edge of the kingdom can that special peat be found which feeds the magical fires of the alchemists. Every day, the peat diggers from the remote town of Nebelbruch risk their lives for the valuable commodity, because death lurks in the bog in many guises: one wrong step and you sink into the black depths or are attacked by flesh-eating swamp creepers. At night, will-o’-the-wisps lure the unwary and lonely to their doom, and in the dark heart of the black moors dwells the last of the cruel dragons: the legendary Night Wyrm.
Again and again the beast kills people, and young Milan’s sister also falls victim to it – a bog diamond in her hand, stolen property of the king. The anger over the theft hits Milan’s entire family hard. His parents are broken and blame him for his sister becoming a thief. And he, plagued by nightmares, does not manage to shake off the accusations.

Caught between feelings of guilt and thoughts of revenge, Milan wanders the moors on long-forgotten paths – without suspecting the truth about himself.

And the night wyrm is still hungry …