UK / Burma / Myanmar: Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a Burma-born British writer and novelist. E O Hoppe, 1913

Born in Akyab (Sittwe) in Arakan (Rakhine), which was then part of British Burma, Hector Hugh Munro was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police.

The young Hector Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and then as a boarder at Bedford School. In 1893 Hector Munro followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. Two years later, having contracted malaria, he resigned and returned to England.

At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German sniper.

Saki's witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.

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E O Hoppe

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