Janet Owen Thomas (29 January 1961 – 5 June 2002) was a British composer and organist. Early life and education Owen Thomas was born on Merseyside to parents of Welsh and German heritage. She attended Merchant Taylors' Girls School In Liverpool and St Hugh's College, Oxford, where her teachers included the prominent organist James Dalton and the composer Robert Saxton. She received a scholarship to travel to Hamburg, where she briefly studied with composer György Ligeti, whose organ music she later wrote an article about. The period in Hamburg led to Owen Thomas being commissioned by to write the solo organ piece Rosaces (1984), which was subsequently widely performed and published by Novello. Return to England and career Returning to England, Owen Thomas worked as a composer, organist and teacher during the 1980s. In 1988, she was commissioned to write a new work to celebrate the opening of the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, New and Better Days, a setting of words from the Book of Isaiah and by Boris Pasternak, for choir, organ and trumpet. The success of this work encouraged her to focus her energies on composition, while she briefly reentered education, enrolling for a course in 1990 in Music technology at the University of York, where she also explored her interests in algorithmic composition, fractals and astronomy, a fascination developed during a visit to India. It was during this time that she wrote a music theatre piece, The Condom Tester's Lament, for speaker and electronics. She went on to take advanced composition studies with Anthony Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of Music. In 1991, the BBC Proms presented the UK premiere of Rosaces. Owen Thomas was the youngest composer whose music was featured in that year's festival, and the work went on to be played in over a dozen countries. She lived and worked in York during the 1990s, where she continued to compose and teach at The Minster School, York, and at the Department of Music at the University of Huddersfield, while ill health increasingly prevented her from performing. Her literary inspirations included the works of Verlaine, Gerard Manley-Hopkins, Wendy Cope and Dylan Thomas, all of whose words she set to music. She intended to complete an operatic setting of Racine's play Phèdre, but was unable to begin work on this before her death. Her music was commissioned and performed by ensembles including the Goldberg Ensemble, the