D. 库兰德

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.

Early life

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". "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."

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." While there, Coupland formed lasting friendships with fellow students Angela Grossman, Attila Richard Lukacs, Derek Root, and Graham Gilmore, each of whom would go on to find their own recognition as artists.

Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the Hokkaido College of Art & Design in Sapporo, Japan and the Istituto Europeo di Design (European Design Institute) in Milan, Italy. He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.

Established as a designer and researcher working for Magazine House in Tokyo, Coupland developed a painful skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate; he reluctantly returned to Vancouver. Whilst still living in Japan, Coupland had been sending postcards to his friend back home. A mutual friend, the editor and journalist Malcolm Parry, happened to read one of Coupland’s postcards and, impressed by his writing ability, offered him a job at Vancouver Magazine, where Parry was then editor-in-chief. Following the success of Coupland’s first assignment, in which he reported on an art scandal involving Los Angeles gallerist Doug Christmas, the novice writer was given a regular monthly feature at the magazine. (The fourth of these feature articles would contain Coupland’s first ruminations on the generational malaise explored in his debut novel.)

Coupland had begun writing professionally as a means of paying his art studio bills, and it was during this same period that he mounted his first art exhibition. Called Floating World, the exhibition comprised a series of representational sculptures depicting oversized everyday objects. Floating World was hosted at the Vancouver Art Gallery from November 20, 1987 to January 28, 1988. Then 26 years old, Coupland was at that time one of the youngest artists to have received an exhibition at the VAG.