Melissa Ann Benn (born 20 February 1957) is a British journalist and writer. She is the only daughter of Tony and Caroline Benn.
Benn was born in Hammersmith, London. She has two older brothers, Stephen and Hilary, and a younger brother, Joshua.[1] She attended Fox Primary School and Holland Park School and graduated with a first in History from the London School of Economics. Benn spent several years working at the National Council for Civil Liberties, as an assistant to Patricia Hewitt, later Secretary of State for Health in Tony Blair's government, and then as a researcher at the Open University, under Professor Stuart Hall, working on deaths in custody.
Benn worked as a journalist at the co-operatively run City Limits magazine. Subsequently she has written for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Marxism Today and many other publications.
Her first novel Public Lives, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1995, was described by the novelist Margaret Forster as " a lovely novel.....remarkably sophisticated for a first". Other reviewers praised the book's "acute intelligence" and "incredibly subtlety". In 1998 Jonathan Cape published Benn's book Madonna and Child: towards a modern politics of motherhood which caused some controversy. Several reviewers, notably in The Guardian and The Observer, attacked Benn's work while the Literary Review called it "a reflective, rich and rewarding investigation into the ...conditions of mothers' lives". The Guardian featured Benn as one of a number of Britain's leading feminist writers.
In 2004, Benn co-edited, with Clyde Chitty, A Tribute to Caroline Benn: Education and Democracy, collecting various papers relevant to the campaign for comprehensive education. In recent years, Benn has become an outspoken advocate for comprehensives and a critic of many aspects of government policy on education. In 2006, she and Fiona Millar published an influential pamphlet ' A Comprehensive Future: Quality and Equality for All our Children' which was launched at the House of Commons in January 2006 at a meeting addressed by the former leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock and a former Secretary of State for Education Estelle Morris.
Her second novel One of Us was published by Chatto and Windus in 2008.
Melissa Benn lives in London with her partner, Paul Gordon, and their two daughters, Hannah and Sarah.