
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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As he prepares to enter the seclusion of a conclave to elect a new pope, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, reflects on diversity and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
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NPR secured one of the last public tours of the Sistine Chapel before it closes for the Catholic Church's upcoming conclave to select the next pope.
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The Trump administration is seeking ideas to boost the birthrate in the U.S. NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks with Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies about his policy recommendations.
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The Trump administration is seeking ideas to boost the birthrate in the U.S. NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks with Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies about his policy recommendations.
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Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency claims to have saved billions of dollars. It has cut costs in some places, but in other areas it has exaggerated its success. What is the future of Musk and DOGE in the Trump orbit?
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NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks with Omaha, Neb., jewelry retailer John Dineen as the price of gold spikes as people look for safe investments.
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Sheila has grown so much she no longer fits in the book she lives in! NPR's Lauren Frayer talks with actor Geena Davis about her new picture book, "The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page."
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The Trump administration is in active negotiations for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine but does not seem to be in talks with China over trade.
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Canadians vote in federal elections April 28. NPR's Lauren Frayer asks Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne what he expects.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks with Luke Kirby of TV's "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" about his role in the new show "Etoile." Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino wrote both shows.