Hector Hugh Munro was born in Burma, then part of British India, where his Scottish father was a military policeman. He had a sister called Ethel and a brother, Charles.
Hector enjoyed his childhood in Burma, where he raised a tiger-cub, but as the children got to school age, their father sent them to their mother‘s home in Devon, England, to be raised by two aunts, where they had a much harder time. Hector hated his aunts and later took revenge on them in his short stories.
Hector went to school in Exeter, then as a boarder to Bedford School. He eventually returned to Burma in his early twenties as a Burmese Military Police officer, but his health suffered, and he had to return to Europe after only a year. Back in England, he took to life as a journalist, writing for The Westminster Gazette, The Daily Express, The Bystander, and The Morning Post, becoming well-known for his "Alice in Westminster" column of parliamentary sketches in the Westminster Gazette. He then became a foreign correspondent for The Morning Post in Russia and the Balkans, which is when he first found time to write the short stories for which he is now best known. For these, he used the pen-name ‘Saki‘, a Farsi word meaning ‘cup-bearer‘ which he probably found in The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam.
A close friend of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, Hector was gay, and he was reported to keep ‘houseboys‘, both in Burma and in London. Together with his dislike of his aunts, this is seen as underlying the misogynist streak in his writing.
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Hector Munro was forty-four, but he speedily enlisted as a private soldier in the Royal Fusiliers and was posted to France with the regiment‘s 22nd Battalion. He refused offers of a commission, but was promoted to Lance Sergeant in September, 1916, and a month later was shot and killed near Beaumount-Hamel.
All of Munro‘s books published during his life-time appeared under the name of Saki. After his death, his other work was collected and published under his own name. The books are:
Reginald (1904)
Reginald in Russia: and Other Sketches (1910)
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
The Toys of Peace and Other Papers (1919)
The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924) and
The Westminster Alice (1926)
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