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BIOGRAPHY

Katie Melua
	BIOGRAPHY | GALLERY | GOSSIP | BLOG

Ketevan "Katie" Melua, born 16 September 1984, is a British singer and musician.

Melua was born in Georgia, but moved to Northern Ireland at the age of eight and then relocated to England at the age of 14. Melua is signed to the small Dramatico record label, under the management of songwriter Mike Batt, and made her musical debut in 2003. She is, as of 2006, the United Kingdom's biggest-selling female artist and Europe's highest selling European female artist.

In November 2003, at the age of just 19, Melua released her first album, Call Off the Search, which reached the top of the United Kingdom album charts and sold 1.2 million copies within its first five months of release. Her second album, Piece by Piece, was released in September 2005 and to date has gone platinum four times.

Ketevan Melua was born in Kutaisi, Georgian SSR in 1984 and spent her first years with her grandparents in the capital 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 experienced severe poverty, having to carry buckets of water up four flights of stairs to her family's flat. Melua would later cite this experience as the reason why she shuns certain materialistic aspects of fame and fortune.

In 1993, in the aftermath of the Georgian Civil War, the family moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where her father took up a position at the prestigious Royal Victoria Hospital. Whilst living in Belfast, Melua attended Roman Catholic schools, St. Catherine's Primary School and Dominican College, Fortwilliam, while her younger brother attended Protestant schools. The family moved again to Redhill, Surrey, in 1998. As a result of her diverse upbringing at an early age, Melua can speak three languages: Georgian, Russian and English.

Due to Melua politically unstable upbringing in 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 Nose" (a spoof of Stars in Their Eyes) and was part of the children's program "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.