Douglas Coupland
Contributor Banff Centre Press
Douglas Coupland was born in 1961 on a Canadian military base in Baden-Sollingen, Germany. He returned to Vancouver in 1965 and was raised there. Coupland graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1984 from the studio program in sculpture and enjoyed early success as a sculptor. His interest in Generation X first emerged in a 1988 article for Vancouver magazine. He continued the project, with cartoonist Paul Leroche, in a strip the two created for Toronto’s Vista. In the fall of 1989, St. Martin’s Press in New York asked him to write a guide to Generation X, something on the model of the Yuppie Handbook. Instead, Coupland moved to Palm Springs, California, to write his first book, Generation X. He currently divides his time between Vancouver, Los Angeles, northern Scotland and other “psychically strong” — as he calls them — regions. Coupland has won two Canadian National Awards for Excellence in Industrial Design. He refuses to own furniture, collects only meteorites, art objects, and letters which are locked in a vault in Vancouver. His ten novels include: Generation X (1991), Microserfs (1995), All Families are Psychotic (2001), and Eleanor Rigby (2004).