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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Twenty-five years after a Northern Ireland peace agreement, a controversial new law bans prosecution of crimes dating to the Troubles. Supporters deem it reconciliation. Victims see denial of justice. -
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Survivors of the Sept. 8 earthquake return to devastated villages. "This was our paradise," says a 74-year-old woman. "Everyone in this village is like family to me, and our family is now shattered." -
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More than 90% of Indians have arranged marriages, and polls show most are happy with that system. But for couples who want to follow their hearts, the risks can be severe. -
A jury in London acquitted Spacey on Wednesday after 12 hours of deliberations. On hearing the verdict, Spacey wiped away tears and mouthed the words "thank you" to the jury. -
The alleged victim's mother says for three years, a BBC star funded her teen's drug habit in exchange for explicit photos. It's the latest scandal to rock Britain's beleaguered public broadcaster. -
It's the 80th anniversary of a little-known battle — by Black U.S. soldiers against segregation in the military. They were convicted of mutiny. Villagers in England want them exonerated.
