Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, on 17 July 1971. He is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His paternal grandfather was born in what became Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad, Russia (St. Petersburg). Both fled Nazi Germany's advance eastward during World War II, and as a result Doctorow's father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan. His grandparents and father migrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow's mother's family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.

Doctorow is a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating back to their time together in elementary school. Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a "hippy summer camp" at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that was influential on his intellectual life and development. He quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto.

Cory Doctorow has stated both that he is not related to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow, and that he may be a third cousin once removed of the novelist. Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as "a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow".

In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003. The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign.

Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff. 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 University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States. 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. He had been a student in the program during 1993–94, but had left without completing a thesis. Doctorow was also a visiting professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom from September 2009 to August 2010. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.

Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008; they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008. Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.

In 2015, Doctorow decided to leave London and move to Los Angeles, expressing disappointment at what he termed London's "death" after British voters' choice of a Conservative government. He stated at the time: "London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated." He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM).

Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic. The circumstances surrounding Doctorow's exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing. Given the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing, MetaFilter described this news as "the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up" for the blog world. Doctorow's exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.

In June 2026, he mentioned in an interview on the podcast Dreaming Against the Machine that he was undergoing treatment for cancer. He said about the cancer that ”it seems very treatable”. In a July 2026 interview on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, he announced that he was cancer-free.

Other work, activism, and fellowships

Doctorow served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000. On 31 October 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. In 2007, together with Austrian art group monochrom, he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, which asks people from all over the world to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theatres.

As a user of the Tor anonymity network for more than a decade during his global travels, Doctorow publicly supports the network; furthermore, Boing Boing operates a "high speed, high-quality exit node." Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference. He also presented on enshittification at the 2024 conference, HOPE XV. In July 2024 Doctorow was appointed by Cornell University to be an A.D. White Professor-at-large for a six-year term.

In 2026, Doctorow endorsed Avi Lewis in that year's federal NDP leadership race.