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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When Syria's new leaders shut 60 Damascus bars, drinkers protested, and the government reversed itself. It's an example of the tussle between secular and Islamist values in the new Syria. -
Israel said it was targeting a building in the Dahiyeh suburb used by Hezbollah to store drones, after early morning rockets were fired from southern Lebanon toward northern Israel on Friday. -
In Syria, many Kurds celebrated Nowruz in secret under Assad. With him gone, Kurdish people are throwing their biggest spring equinox party in decades. But some still fear for their safety.
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People in Lebanon say they're in a state of panic after Israel struck parts of the country Saturday in response to rocket fire at northern Israel.
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The plans include the demolition of Old Trafford, the team's iconic 115-year-old stadium. -
From disco to Afrobeats, King Charles's new Apple Music playlist features his fave tunes from former U.K. colonies. Can music heal royal rifts?
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Jet fuel is spilling into the North Sea after a U.S.-flagged fuel tanker collided with a cargo ship off the eastern coast of England. Thirty-seven people have been brought to shore. -
After the UK offered peacekeepers to Ukraine, Vice President Vance opined on "some random country" that haven't fought wars in decades, angering Britons.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy received a warm welcome in London from Britain's prime minster and other European leaders who pledged to work together to stop Russia's war in Ukraine.
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In his visit on Thursday, the prime minister will try to leverage the U.K.'s so-called "special relationship" with U.S. and act as a bridge between the Trump administration and U.S. allies in Europe.
