Canadian journalist and novelist best known for observations on modern-day American culture and for popularizing the term Generation X.

Coupland was born on a Canadian military base in Germany. His family relocated to Canada in the mid-1960s, and he grew up in Vancouver. In 1984 he went to art school to become a sculptor but then moved to Hawaii to study Japanese business science. After interning briefly at a company in Japan, he returned to Canada and began writing for a magazine based in Toronto.

Coupland's first published novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), describes the lives of three affluent, disaffected Californians in their 20s by way of a series of stories supplemented with cartoons and dictionary-style definitions of cultural buzzwords. The novel became widely popular, and its title was soon applied to the generation of Americans born during the 1960s and 1970s. His next novel, Shampoo Planet (1992), also centred on characters in their 20s. Life After God (1994) is an introspective collection of short stories about contemporary suburbanites. The novel Microserfs (1995) had its origins in an assignment for Wired magazine during which Coupland observed employees of Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Wash., U.S. Microserfs was his fictional account of the experience; it highlighted workers' pursuit of meaning in a seemingly meaningless environment.

Coupland released a collage of previously published photographs, essays, and short fiction as Polaroids from the Dead in 1996. In 1998 he published the novel Girlfriend in a Coma and, with Kip Ward, Lara's Book: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon, an illustrated tribute to the popularity of the computer game Tomb Raider. Subsequent novels include Miss Wyoming (1999), Hey Nostradamus! (2003), JPod (2006), and The Gum Thief (2007). Coupland also wrote the screenplay for Everything's Gone Green (2006).