Author
Saki
1870-1916
British writer, born Hector Hugh Munro, whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre short stories satirise Edwardian society and culture.
Born Hector Hugh Munro.
Hector Hugh Munro was born on 18 December 1870 in Akyab (now Sittwe) in British Burma, the son of an Inspector General in the Indian Imperial Police. His mother died in 1872, and the children were sent to Devon to be raised by their grandmother and aunts in a strict and puritanical household. His sister Ethel later said the aunt in his story 'The Lumber Room' was an almost perfect portrait of their Aunt Augusta.
He followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police in 1893, but fever sent him home from Burma after fifteen months. In 1896 he moved to London to make a living as a writer. In 1900 he first used the name Saki, taken from a figure in Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, for political satire in The Westminster Gazette.
His stories, read here in The Short Stories of Saki, first appeared in newspapers and were then gathered into books such as Reginald (1904), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914). In many of them stuffy authority figures are set against the forces of nature, and several feature his recurring hero Clovis Sangrail, a clever, mischievous young man. They include 'The Open Window', 'Sredni Vashtar' and 'Tobermory'.
When the First World War began he was 43 and over the age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined up as an ordinary trooper. He was killed by a German sniper near Beaumont-Hamel in France in November 1916, and has no known grave.
Sources: wikipedia.org
