Melanie Daiken was born in London on July 27th, 1945. She was an English composer and lecturer.

She studied composition and the piano at the RAM, the University of Ghana, the Paris Conservatoire, where she was a pupil of Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, and London University. She has taught composition at London University, Morley College and at the RAM, where she was appointed deputy head of composition and contemporary music studies in 1986. Daiken has written much vocal music, setting texts by authors as diverse as Paul Eluard, F. García Lorca, Charles Baudelaire, Rupert Brooke, Georg Trakl and Samuel Beckett. In 1971 her opera Mayakovsky and the Sun was commissioned by the Edinburgh Festival and performed by the Music Theatre Ensemble under Alexander Goehr. Several of her chamber works have been performed on BBC Radio 3, including the striking Requiem (1983) for solo piano.

[Biography from Oxford Music Online]