Jan Gradvall, born 1963, is an award-winning writer and Sweden's most respected music journalist of the last 40 years. He has written several books on popular culture before, but says that Melancholy Undercover 'feels as though everything I've written about music has led up to this book.' Gradvall won Journalist of the Year, awarded by trade organization Sweden's Magazines in 2001 and was instrumental in the founding of the Swedish Music Hall of Fame, for which he served as chairman in its first three years. He has a uniquely close journalistic relationship with ABBA, and has appeared in two BBC documentaries, The Joy of ABBA and Flatpack Pop, about the Swedish songwriting phenomenon, before writing Melancholy Undercover.