Life and Career
Born in Toronto, Canada, Doctorow describes his parents as "techno-utopians" and "sort of quasi-doctrinaire Trotskyist school teachers." His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan, and Doctorow became involved with nuclear disarmament activism and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from the SEED School, an anarchistic "free school" in Toronto, and attended four universities without attaining a degree. He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative in Big Rideau Lake in Ontario.
In 1992, Doctorow went on a volunteer visit to Costa Rica with Youth Challenge International (YCI), which he found "profoundly good and profoundly enriching". In June 1999, he co-initiated the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn. The company was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario during the summer of 2003.
Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time during January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He was formerly a student in the program during 1993-94, but quit without completing a thesis. Doctorow is also a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Open University in the United Kingdom.
Doctorow married Alice Taylor on October 26, 2008, and together they have one daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born on February 3, 2008. Cory became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.
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