David Sedaris

In 2019, Sedaris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As of 2019, Sedaris lives in Rackham, West Sussex, England, with his longtime partner, painter and set designer Hugh Hamrick. Sedaris mentions Hamrick in a number of his stories, and describes the two of them as the "sort of couple who wouldn't get married." Sedaris is known to regularly wear a headlamp at night and spend hours removing litter from nearby roads and highways. Due to this hobby, he is locally known as "Pig Pen" and has a garbage truck named after him.

In 2014, he participated in Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary film by David Thorpe about stereotypes of gay men's speech patterns.

Sedaris's ninth book, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, was released in April 2013.

David's youngest sister Tiffany died by suicide in May 2013, just before her 50th birthday.

A frequent guest of late-night US talk show host Craig Ferguson, in April 2012, Sedaris joined Ferguson and the cast of CBS's The Late, Late Show in Scotland for a theme week in and around Ferguson's hometown between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The five weeknight episodes aired in May 2012.

In July 2011, Sedaris's essay "Chicken Toenails, Anyone?", published in The Guardian, garnered some criticism over concerns that it was insensitive towards China and Chinese culture.

In April 2010, BBC Radio 4 aired Meet David Sedaris, a four-part series of essays, which Sedaris read before a live audience. A second series of six programmes began airing on BBC Radio 4 Extra in June 2011, with a third series beginning in September 2012. In July 2017, the sixth series was aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra. In 2010, he released a collection of stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. Sedaris released a collection of essays, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, in 2013 and, in 2017, published a collection of his 1977–2002 diaries, Theft By Finding. Also in 2013, the film adaptation of an essay from Naked was released as a feature-length movie, C.O.G.

In December 2008, Sedaris received an honorary doctorate from Binghamton University.

In September 2007, a new Sedaris collection was announced for publication the following year. The collection's working title was All the Beauty You Will Ever Need, but Sedaris retitled it Indefinite Leave to Remain and finally settled on the title When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Although at least one news source assumed the book would be fables, Sedaris said in October 2007 that the collection might include a "surprisingly brief story about [his] decision to quit smoking" along with other stories including about chimpanzees at a typing school, and people visiting [him] in France.

In 2007, in an article in The New Republic, Alexander S. Heard stated that much of Sedaris's work is insufficiently factual to justify being marketed as nonfiction. Several published responses to Heard's article argued that Sedaris's readers are aware that his descriptions and stories are intentionally exaggerated and manipulated to maximize comic effect, while others used the controversy as a springboard for discussing the liberties publishers are willing to take when calling books 'nonfiction'.

In 2004, Sedaris published Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which reached number 1 on The New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List in June of that year. The audiobook of Dress Your Family, read by Sedaris, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album; the same year, Sedaris was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his recording Live at Carnegie Hall. In March 2006, Ira Glass said that Sedaris's next book would be a collection of animal fables; that year, Sedaris included several animal fables in his US book tour, and three of his fables were broadcast on This American Life.

In April 2001, Variety reported Sedaris had sold the Me Talk Pretty One Day film rights to director Wayne Wang, who was adapting four stories from the book for Columbia Pictures. Wang had completed the script and begun casting when Sedaris asked to "get out of it", after he and his sister worried how their family might be portrayed. He wrote about the conversation and its aftermath in the essay "Repeat After Me." Sedaris recounted that Wang was "a real prince ... I didn't want him to be mad at me, but he was so grown up about it. I never saw how it could be turned into a movie anyway."

Me Talk Pretty One Day was written mostly in France over seven months and published in 2000 to "practically unanimous rave reviews." For that book, Sedaris won the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor.

His next five essay collections, Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), became New York Times Best Sellers.

In 1994, Sedaris published Barrel Fever, a collection of stories and essays. He became a frequent contributor when Ira Glass began a weekly hour-long PRI/Chicago Public Radio show, This American Life, in 1995. Sedaris began writing essays for Esquire and The New Yorker. In 1997, he published another collection of essays, Naked, which won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction from Publishing Triangle in 1998.

"Santaland Diaries" was a success with listeners, and made Sedaris what The New York Times called "a minor phenomenon." He began recording a monthly segment for NPR based on his diary entries, edited and produced by Glass, and signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company. In 1993, Sedaris told The New York Times he was publishing his first book, a collection of stories and essays, and had 70 pages written of his second book, a novel "about a man who keeps a diary and whom Mr. Sedaris described as 'not me, but a lot like me'."

Sedaris has written with his sister, actress Amy Sedaris, several plays under the name "The Talent Family". These include Stump the Host (1993), Stitches (1994), and The Little Frieda Mysteries (1997). All were produced and presented by Meryl Vladimer when she was the artistic director of "the CLUB" at La MaMa, E.T.C., and The Book of Liz (2002) was produced by Ania A. Shapiro.

While working odd jobs across Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered in a Chicago club by radio host Ira Glass; Sedaris was reading a diary he had kept since 1977. Glass asked him to appear on his weekly local program, The Wild Room. Sedaris said, "I owe everything to Ira ... My life just changed completely, like someone waved a magic wand." Sedaris's success on The Wild Room led to his National Public Radio debut on December 23, 1992, when he read a radio essay on Morning Edition titled "Santaland Diaries," which described his purported experiences as an elf at Macy's department store during Christmas in New York.

He moved to Chicago in 1983 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. (He did not attend Princeton University, although he spoke fondly of doing so in "What I Learned," a comic baccalaureate address delivered at Princeton in June 2006.)

After graduating from Jesse O. Sanderson High School in Raleigh, Sedaris briefly attended Western Carolina University before transferring to and dropping out of Kent State University in 1977. In his teens and twenties, David dabbled in visual and performance art. He describes his lack of success in several of his essays.

David Raymond Sedaris (/s ɪ ˈ d ɛər ɪ s / ; born December 26, 1956) is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. He is the brother and writing collaborator of actor Amy Sedaris.