Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab, in what was then Burma and is now known as Myanmar. The son of a colonial official, he was in fact brought up in Devon, England, under the fierce guard of two aunts, this was due to the fact that when the young Munro was two years old his mother was killed by a charging cow. The aunts were to play a large and vengeful part in his later writings, as were homicidal animals.

After an attempted stint in the Burmese Police, following in his father’s footsteps, he returned to England due to ill health in 1896 and started a career writing for several of the many London periodicals. He adopted the pen name Saki, possibly from the character in The Rubayat of Omar Khyyam to which he refers in his stories, and possibly from the innocent looking small ape that can turn very nasty, described with great relish in The Remoulding of Groby Lington.