American writer, broadcaster and comedian David Sedaris is coming to Australia for his third spoken-word tour.
Perhaps bravely, the openly gay performer is taking his show to Tasmania for the first time. 
Sedaris will kick off his An Evening With ??? tour in Newcastle on   January 17, 2016 - almost exactly two years after his last tour of Australia. He will also appear in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart and Perth.
He evidently has a soft spot for Australia, despite once likening it to "Canada in a thong".
In 2009, he wrote in The New Yorker of a visit to Daylesford, the picturesque and gay-friendly spa town in central Victoria.
"The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted," he recalled. "Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer.
"If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like." 
He also recalled a traumatic moment from his childhood, when his father beat him with a paddle for singing Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree loudly and late at night with his sister Amy, herself a performer of note.
" 'Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra! Gay your life must be.' Actually, maybe it was that last bit that bothered him," Sedaris wrote.
The author of nine collections of essays and short stories, Sedarais, 58, lived in France for many years, regaling readers with tales of his life in the countryside with long-term partner Hugh Hamrick. They now live in England.
"I don't think of myself as an exile," he said in 2014. "No one forced me to leave the US. Rather, I just like moving. I like being a foreigner."
He should feel right at home in Australia, then.
Tickets for An Evening with David Sedaris go on sale   August 12. Details: davidsedaristour.com.au
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