Douglas Coupland (Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist) Add a review

Douglas Coupland (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian visual artist and writer. Trained originally as a sculptor, Coupland found unexpected success as a novelist with the publication of his 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has since gone on to publish dozens of books, including novels, short story collections, and essay collections. He has also worked as a columnist and contributor for a number of periodicals, including the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and Wired Magazine.

Coupland has maintained a prolific visual art practice in parallel to his literary career, with the former eventually becoming his main focus. Primarily a mixture of sculpture and painting, his art–like his writing–has explored a variety of interests, including 20th-century pop culture, the relationship between technology and society, environmental pollution, spirituality, ecology, and the nature of Canadian national identity. Coupland’s art has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world: His first major retrospective, Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, was shown in Vancouver and Toronto from 2014 to 2015, while his first major solo exhibition in Europe, Bit Rot, was shown at Rotterdam's Kunstinstituut Melly as well as Munich’s Villa Stuck between 2015 and 2017. Coupland has also created numerous public art installations which have been integrated into Canada’s urban landscape. Some of his most famous works in this regard include his Digital Orca in Vancouver; as well as the various pieces created for Toronto’s Canoe Landing Park.  

Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, a member of the Order of British Columbia, and a member of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. 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 his Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan.