Ketevan Melua was born on 16 September 1984 to Amiran and Tamara Melua in Kutaisi, Georgia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. She spent her first years with her grandparents in Tbilisi before moving with her parents and brother to the town of Batumi, Ajaria, where her father worked as a heart specialist. During this time, Melua sometimes had to carry buckets of water up five flights of stairs to her family’s flat and according to her, “Now, when I’m staying in luxurious hotels, I think back to those days”.

In 1993, when Melua was eight, the family moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the aftermath of the Georgian Civil War. Her father, a heart surgeon, took up a position at the Royal Victoria Hospital. The family remained in Belfast, living close to Falls Road, until Melua was 12. During her time in Northern Ireland, Melua attended St Catherine’s Primary School on the Falls Road and later moved to Dominican College, Fortwilliam.

Due to her upbringing in politically unstable Georgia and troubled Belfast, Melua initially planned to become either a historian or a politician. This changed in 2000, at the age of 15, when Melua took part in a talent competition on British television channel ITV called “Stars Up Their Noses” (a spoof of Stars in Their Eyes) as part of the children’s programme Mad for It. Melua won the contest by singing Badfinger’s “Without You”. The prize was £350 worth of MFI vouchers, with which she bought a chair for her father. Had she lost the contest, she would have been gunged.

Melua’s debut album, Call off the Search, was released on 3 November 2003 and featured two songs written by Melua: “Belfast (Penguins and Cats)”, a song about Melua’s experience of her time in the troubled capital of Northern Ireland, and “Faraway Voice”, a song about the death of Eva Cassidy. Melua also covered songs by Delores J. Silver (“Learnin’ the Blues”), John Mayall (“Crawling up a Hill”), Randy Newman (“I Think It’s Going to Rain Today”) and James Shelton (“Lilac Wine”, originally a UK hit for singer Elkie Brooks). The other six songs on the album were by Mike Batt.

It was initially difficult for Melua and Batt to obtain airplay for the album’s lead single, the Mike Batt song “The Closest Thing to Crazy”. This changed when BBC Radio 2 producer Paul Walters heard the single and played it on the popular Terry Wogan breakfast show. Wogan played “The Closest Thing to Crazy” frequently in the summer of 2003. Wogan’s support raised Melua’s profile and when Call Off the Search was released in November 2003 supported by a TV campaign financed by Batt, it entered the top 40 UK albums chart. The single achieved the number 10 spot in the UK chart. After an appearance on the Royal Variety Show the album was further boosted and Batt continued a relentless marketing campaign which saw the album hit the number one spot in January 2004. Call Off the Search reached the top five in Ireland, top 20 in Norway and top 30 in a composite European chart. In the UK the album sold 1.9 million copies, making it six times platinum, and spent six weeks at the top of the UK charts. It sold 3.6 million copies worldwide. Subsequent singles from the album did not repeat the success of the first – the second single and album title track “Call Off the Search” reached number 19, and the third single “Crawling up a Hill” got to number 41. The album achieved 6X platinum status in UK, 3X platinum in Norway, 2X platinum in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Ireland, Platinum in South Africa, Australia and Switzerland and gold (500,000 units sold) in New Zealand and Hong Kong.

Melua is occasionally referred to as an ‘adrenaline junkie’ because she enjoys roller coasters and funfairs and often paraglides and hang glides. She has skydived four times and taken several flying lessons, and in 2004 she was lowered from a 200-metre building in New Zealand at 60 mph. When asked about Melua being an ‘adrenaline junkie’, Mike Batt said, “she enjoys extremes, but in life her emotions are always in check”. In November 2009, Melua nearly drowned after she breathed in and choked on a lungful of water when diving in a lake near Heathrow Airport.

In November 2004 Melua was asked to take part in Band Aid 20 in which she joined a chorus of British and Irish pop singers to create a rendition of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to raise money for famine relief in Africa. Then in March 2005, Melua sang “Too Much Love Will Kill You” with Brian May at the 46664 concert in George, South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s HIV charity. Melua had been a fan of Queen since her childhood in Georgia when her uncles played the band’s music, so performing with May was a realisation of a childhood dream. Later in 2005, through her role as a goodwill ambassador to the charity Save the Children, Melua went to Sri Lanka where she observed the work the charity was doing for children in the area after the civil war and Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2006 Melua donated all the proceeds from her single “Spider’s Web” to the charity.

On 10 August 2005, just before she turned 21, Melua became a British citizen along with her parents and brother. The citizenship ceremony took place in Weybridge, Surrey. Becoming a British citizen meant that Melua had held three citizenships before she was 21; first Soviet, then Georgian and finally, British.

Melua’s second album, Piece by Piece, was released on 26 September 2005. Its lead single was the Mike Batt song, “Nine Million Bicycles”, which was released a week before the album on 19 September and was number three in the UK singles chart. The album contains four more songs written by Melua herself, four more by Batt (including “Nine Million Bicycles”), one Batt/Melua collaboration and three more songs described as new versions of “great songs”. The band line-up was the same as on the first album. The album debuted at the number one spot on the UK Albums Chart in the week of 3 October 2005. This album broke Melua across Europe where it sold 1 million copies in Germany alone and achieved the number one position in Billboard’s “European” albums chart. It was 4X platinum in UK and in Ireland, 3X platinum in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Germany, 2X platinum in Poland and Switzerland and at least platinum or gold in France, Iceland, South Africa, Austria, Belgium, New Zealand and Sweden. Worldwide sales to date are in excess of 3.5 million.

On 30 September 2005, Melua came under criticism in The Guardian from writer and scientist Simon Singh for the lyrics (written by Mike Batt) of the track “Nine Million Bicycles”. Batt’s disputed lyrics were:

Melua has stated that the rock band Queen were a huge influence on her as a child/teenager, with one of her memories of music being her uncle playing records by Queen and Led Zeppelin. She performed with Queen at the 46664 concert in South Africa in March 2005.

A third single, “Spider’s Web” was released on 17 April 2006 and peaked at number 52 in the UK. Melua embarked on a concert tour in support of Piece by Piece, the UK leg of which started in Aberdeen, Scotland on 20 January 2006. Towards the end of 2006, Melua released the single, “It’s Only Pain”, which was written by Mike Batt. This was followed by the release of “Shy Boy”, also written by Batt.

On 2 October 2006, Melua entered the Guinness Book of Records for playing the deepest underwater concert 303 metres below sea level on the Norwegian Statoil’s Troll A platform in the North Sea. Melua and her band underwent extensive medical tests and survival training in Norway before flying by helicopter to the rig. Melua later described achieving the record as “the most surreal gig I have ever done”. Melua’s concert is commemorated in the DVD release Concert Under the Sea, released in June 2007.

Melua appeared on the BBC’s The Culture Show in November 2006 advocating Paul McCartney as her choice in the search for Britain’s greatest living icon.

Melua’s third album, Pictures, was released in the UK on 1 October 2007 and was announced to be, at least temporarily, the last of her albums in collaboration with Mike Batt as lead writer and producer. It also features Melua’s friend Molly McQueen, the former frontwoman of The Faders, as co-writer of “Perfect Circle”. Melua also collaborated with Andrea McEwan on the album, who wrote the lyrics for “What I Miss About You” and “Dirty Dice”. The album also featured a cover of “In My Secret Life” by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson. Melua said of the cover, “[It] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else.”

On 7 July 2007, Melua performed at the German leg of Live Earth in Hamburg and in December of that year, Melua released a cover of the Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World” in which she sang with a recording of the late Eva Cassidy. All profits from the single, which entered the UK singles chart at No. 1 on 16 December 2007, went to the Red Cross.

The Melua family then moved to Sutton, London, and some time later moved again to Redhill, Surrey. In 2008, Melua moved out of her parents’ home in Maida Vale to an apartment in Notting Hill, where she transformed the spare bedroom into a recording studio. Melua is fluent in English and speaks some Russian; despite still speaking her native Georgian fluently she has admitted that she cannot write songs in the language. Melua is also partly of Canadian and Russian ancestry.

In 2009, Melua was named as the new face of the leading French cashmere designer, Eric Bompard.

In September 2010, Melua was ordered by her doctors to stop working for a few months after suffering a nervous breakdown, resulting in her hospitalisation for six weeks. As a result, all touring and promotional activities were postponed until the following year.

Melua’s fourth album, The House, was released on 24 May 2010. Songwriters include Lauren Christy, Guy Chambers and Rick Nowels, with William Orbit producing.

In January 2012, Melua confirmed her engagement to World Superbike racer and musician James Toseland. The couple married on 1 September 2012 in the Nash Conservatory at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, southwest London. A 2020 interview with the national Swedish news agency TT revealed that the couple separated but remained friends. Interviewed on ITV’s Lorraine live from West London on 16 October 2020, Melua confirmed the couple had divorced and have “Great respect for each other.”

Melua’s fifth studio album, Secret Symphony was released on 5 March 2012 and also debuted high in the UK album chart. The album was produced, arranged and conducted by Mike Batt. Melua said in a statement: “This album was going to be my ‘singer’s album’. I had always wanted to do this one day; singing other people’s songs brings something out of you and your voice that isn’t perhaps where you would have gone vocally with your own material.”

Melua’s sixth studio album, Ketevan, was released on 16 September 2013. It was co-produced by Mike Batt and his son, singer-songwriter Luke Batt, both of whom contributed songs, separately and in collaboration with Melua. When Ketevan entered the UK charts at number 6, Melua joined a very small group of female artists, which includes Madonna and Kate Bush, who have scored six consecutive UK top 10 studio albums. Ketevan also entered the top 10 in France, Poland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland in its first week of release.

Melua’s seventh album, In Winter, was released on 14 October 2016. For this record, Melua went back to her native Georgia to record an album with the Gori Women’s Choir, a native Georgian all-woman singing troupe. Melua revealed during an interview with The Guardian that her partnership with Mike Batt had come to an end after her last album, as it was a six-album deal with Batt’s Dramatico records. “It was a six-album deal,” she explains, “so when the sixth one was done, you know – it was finished and it was time for us to part ways…..It was maybe a bit more mutual on one side than the other. Yeah – it wasn’t easy, as you can imagine. And I’m still incredibly proud of the work we did together. But it had to happen and I think it has been mutual … um, eventually.”

In 2017, she released a cover version of “Fields of Gold”, the official song for Children in Need.

In June 2020, Melua supported the Georgian Red Cross Society in their efforts to assist the vulnerable population in Georgia during the COVID-19 pandemic by performing a live charity concert featuring songs that were requested by her followers on her social media accounts. Melua released her eighth studio album, Album No. 8, on 16 October 2020. The lead single off the album, “A Love like That”, which was produced by Leo Abrahams, received its first airplay on 30 June 2020 on BBC Radio 2. The video for the song features British actor Billy Howle and was directed by Charlie Lightening, who has directed videos for the likes of Paul McCartney, Jamiroquai and Liam Gallagher. The second single, “Airtime” premiered on 24 July 2020. The video for ‘Airtime’, which again featured actor Billy Howle and was also directed by Charlie Lightning, was shot around Herne Bay over two days and was filmed according to COVID-19 lockdown guidelines.