Lauren Frayer
Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.
Before moving to India, Lauren was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.
In Europe, Lauren chronicled the economic crisis in Spain & Portugal, where youth unemployment spiked above 50%. She profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. From Paris, Lauren reported live on NPR's Morning Edition, as French police moved in on the Charlie Hebdo terror suspects. In the fall of 2015, Lauren spent nearly two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.
Farther afield, she introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.
Lauren has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.
Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, an assignment for which the AP nominated her and her colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize.
On a break from journalism, Lauren drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.
Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Lauren holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.
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Manchester is where the Industrial Revolution was born. It's also where Marx & Engels lived & coined the term 'proletariat.' NPR looks at the origins of an idea every politician has sought to co-opt.
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After a historic election defeat, U.K. Conservatives are rebuilding. This weekend, they'll choose a new leader. Taking a page from the GOP playbook, the two contenders are from the party's right wing.
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The British Commonwealth Summit begins Monday in Samoa as leaders of commonewealth nations seek reforms
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Convicted of murdering babies in her care, neonatal nurse Lucy Letby is one of the UK's most notorious serial killers. But there are fresh questions about evidence, and whether she got a fair trial.
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Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden is one highlight in a busy travel schedule for both campaigns as they rush to mobilize voters before Election Day.
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In a series of strikes against Iran, Israel said it targeted military facilities. President Biden said he hopes this is the end, not the beginning of all-out war between the two.
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Italy has opened a detention center for migrants in Albania to discourage others from crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
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Privatized U.K. water utilities have failed to upgrade Victorian plumbing, and 75% of U.K. rivers now contain unsafe levels of raw sewage. A group of athlete-activists are lobbying for change.
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In London’s hipster neighborhood of Hackney, four primary schools shut this year, and playgrounds are empty. Rising costs and falling birthrates mean some of Europe’s biggest cities have fewer kids.
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The U.K. used coal power to drive the Industrial Revolution and expand the British Empire. It's now the first major economy to quit the fossil fuel, a primary contributor to global warming.
