Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British science fiction author, journalist, blogger, and technology activist. His novels have been translated into dozens of languages.

Doctorow has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine, and Sunburst Awards, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards.

Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario. His grandparents and father emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow's mother's family was Ukrainian-Russian Romanian.

Doctorow embarked on his fiction-selling journey at the age of 17. He successfully sold numerous stories, followed by the publication of the Craphound in 1998.

In January 2003, Doctorow released his debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This novel held a remarkable distinction as the first-ever published work under one of the Creative Commons licenses. This approach granted readers the freedom to share the electronic version of the novel without any monetary gain or the creation of derivative works.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was nominated for a Nebula Award and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004. The same year the short story "0wnz0red" from the Sunburst Award-winning collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2004) was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

His other novels have been released with Creative Commons licenses. Cory Doctorow used the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time as print versions are published. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

In 2008 came out his New York Times Bestseller Little Brother. This young adult novel is about four teenagers in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's attacks on the Bill of Rights.

Little Brother won the 2009 Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award, and the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. It has also been adapted for the stage by Josh Costello.

His recent books include Red Team Blues, an anti-finance finance thriller (2023); Chokepoint Capitalism (with Rebecca Giblin) (2022), a nonfiction book about creative labor markets and monopoly; Attack Surface (2020), a standalone sequel to Little Brother intended for adults, Poesy The Monster Slayer, a picture book for young children (2020), the nonfiction tech/politics book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2020), Radicalized (2019) and Walkaway (2017), science fiction for adults; and In Real Life, a young adult graphic novel created with Jen Wang (2014).

Cory Doctorow co-founded the open-source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, and the Metabrainz Foundation. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net.

In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement.

In 2023, Verso will publish The Iтеуктуе Con, a nonfiction book about monopoly and radical interoperability. Also, Tor Books will publish more science fiction novels for adults called The Lost Cause.

Cory Doctorow now lives in Los Angeles.

Photo credit: craphound.com