Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist.

Coupland was born on December 30, 1961, at RCAF Station Baden-Soellingen in West Germany, the second of four sons of Douglas Charles Thomas Coupland, a medical officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and C. Janet Coupland, a graduate in comparative religion from McGill University.

In 1965, the Coupland family moved to West Vancouver, where Coupland's father opened a private family medical practice at the completion of his military tour.

Coupland describes his upbringing as producing a "blank slate".

Graduating from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979, Coupland went to McGill University with the intention of (like his father) studying the sciences, specifically physics.

Coupland left McGill at the year's end and returned to Vancouver to attend art school.

At the Emily Carr College of Art and Design on Granville Island in Vancouver, in Coupland's words, "I ... had the best four years of my life. It's the one place I've felt truly, totally at home. It was a magic era between the hippies and the PC goon squads. Everyone talked to everyone and you could ask anybody anything."

Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy and the Hokkaido College of Art & Design in Sapporo, Japan.

He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.

Established as a designer working in Tokyo, Coupland developed a skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate, and returned to Vancouver.

Before leaving Japan, Coupland had sent a postcard ahead to a friend in Vancouver.

The friend's husband, a magazine editor, read the postcard and offered Coupland a job writing for the magazine.

Coupland began writing for magazines as a means of paying his studio bills.

Reflecting on his becoming a writer, Coupland has admitted that he became one "By accident. I never wanted to be a writer. Now that I do it, there's nothing else I'd rather do."

He has stated that he has not been employed since 1988.

From 1989 to 1990, Coupland lived in the Mojave Desert working on a handbook about the birth cohort that followed the baby boom.

He received a $22,500 advance from St. Martin's Press to write the nonfiction handbook.

Instead, Coupland wrote the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob.

He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television.

He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice.

His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as well as the Villa Stuck.

Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the Order of British Columbia.

It was rejected in Canada before being accepted by an American publishing house in 1991.

Reflecting on the writing of his debut novel years later, Coupland said, "I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I'd sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn't happening in reality."

Not an instant success, the novel steadily increased in sales, eventually attracting a following behind its core idea of "Generation X".

Shampoo Planet was published by Pocket Books in 1992.

It focused on the generation after Generation X, the group called "Global Teens" in his first novel and now generally labeled Generation Y (or Millennials).

Coupland permanently moved back to Vancouver soon after the novel was published.

He had spent his "twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city out there, until it dawned on [him] that Vancouver is the best one going".

He wrote a collection of small books, which together were compiled, after the advice of his publisher, into the book Life After God.

This collection of short stories, with its focus on spirituality, initially provoked polarized reaction before eventually revealing itself as a bellwether text for the avant-garde sensibility identified by Ferdinand Mount as "Christian post-Christian".

In 1994, Coupland was working for the newly formed magazine Wired.

While there, Coupland wrote a short story about the life of the employees at Microsoft Corporation.

Over his own protestations, Coupland was dubbed the spokesperson for a generation, stating in 2006 "I was just doing what I do and people sort of stuck that on to me. It's not like I spend my days thinking that way."

The terms Generation X and McJob, used by Coupland in the novel, ultimately entered the vernacular.

He was the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, with a companion novel to the lectures published by House of Anansi Press: Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been long-listed twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.

He published his thirteenth novel Worst. Person. Ever. in 2012.

He also released an updated version of City of Glass and the biography Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.

"My mother comes from a sour-faced family of preachers who from the 19th century to well into the 20th scoured the prairies thumping Bibles. Her parents tried to get away from that but unwittingly transmitted their values to my mother. My father's family weren't that different."