Melisende is the nome-de-plume of Hebe Scandalakis, nee Kouyas. She was born in Athens in 1910, and studied French, German, music, dance and painting. She worked at times as a journalist for various Athens newspapers, or as a German teacher in a series of schools. Between 1945 and 1955 she was a full-time employee of the National Broadcasting Corporation adapting dramatic works and translating poetry for literary programmes.

Her first literary appearance was in 1930 with her Φωνές εντόμου collection of poetry, the metaphysical tone of her poetry being particularly obvious. Φωνές εντόμου were followed by the following collections: Προφητείες (1931), Φλεγόμενη βάτος (1935), O γυρισμός του Ασώτου (1936), Ωσαννά και Οραματισμός (1939), Λυρική Εξομολόγηση (1945), Η εποχή του ύπνου και της αγρύπνιας (1950), Ανθρώπινο Σχήμα (1961), Το φράγμα της Σιωπής (1965). The first volume of her collected works was published in 1965, under the title Eκλογή (1930-1950), the second volume being Tα ποιήματα  (1930-1974), and the third in 1986 Οδοιπορικό, ποιήματα (1930-1984).

With Λυρική Εξομολόγηση Melisende turned her back on metric verse in order to adopt free poetry, but without changing in any respect the way she treated her internal or external world.

Melisende did not want to follow in the footsteps of other female poets of her times, who wrote love poetry. She is rather a spiritual poet, full of sensitivity and ill at ease when confronted with all the facets of life. Because she cannot find answers to her questions about life and death, she seeks expiation and salvation in supplication, beseeching and prayer. Her poetry is located in the realm of the existential and of metaphysical anguish. The notion of death lies at the core of her poetry of being, ornate with symbolism. G. Sarandaris has this to say: G. Sarandaris notes the following: “Melisende's poetry is gestated by the pain of being, which the poet herself veils in order to spare both the reader's blushes and her own. But she does not wipe out, nor extinguish her pain. Nor does she attempt to deceive herself, not even occasionally. Starting off from a situation which she seems to be fated to, she attempts, and often succeeds, to ponder on the life of the individual faced by a very uncertain eternity.”

Michael Peranthes writes: “her religious consciousness crosses the paths of other situtations which are usually tense and painful and also stem from her own self; these demand of God, or aim for a symbolic expansion to the land of fantasy, with intensity and distress, almost beaten up by moreal matters”.

Besides poetry, Melisende also published her children's play O μικρός αδελφός (1960) and has translated poetry by Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, H.W. Longfellow, Pierre Garniere, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot and Bertold Brecht. A selection of her essays under the title Nύξειςwas published in 1985, followed by a volume titled Tον όρθρον των ερχόμενον, which contains 36 studies of her work and an extended bibliography. She was honoured by the Athens Academy in 1936 and awarded the State Prize for Poetry, Second Class, in 1965 and First Class in 1976, among other awards. She died in 1990 in Athens. He died in Athens in 1990.