Melissa Ann Benn (born 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 three brothers, including Hilary Benn and Stephen Benn, 3rd Viscount Stansgate. 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 then worked as a journalist for City Limits magazine. Subsequently she has written for other publications, including The Guardian, The London Review of Books and Marxism Today.
Her first novel Public Lives was published in 1995, described by writer Margaret Forster as "remarkably sophisticated for a first". In 1998 Jonathan Cape published Benn's Madonna and Child: towards a modern politics of motherhood which caused some controversy. The reviewers for The Guardian and The Observer, criticised the book 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 at the time.