Mervyn Roberts was born in Abergele, Denbighshire on the 23rd of November, 1906. He was a Welsh composer, who read English and history at Trinity College, Cambridge (1925–8). In 1924–5 and intermittently between 1928 and 1939 he studied at the RCM.

A fastidious composer, he produced his most important work for the piano. This, with its highly chromatic but fundamentally tonal idiom and its elegant, spacious keyboard writing, places him in the tradition of Bax and Ireland. The most important of his solo piano works is the Sonata, for which he was awarded the Edwin Evans Prize in 1950. There are also some substantial pieces for two pianos, written mainly for performance with his wife. The songs and choral works are on the whole more diatonic, often with a pronounced modal flavour.

In addition to his activities as a composer Roberts contributed to music journals, notably Music in Education.

He died in 1990.

[Biography adapted from Oxford Music Online]