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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It began on the edgy margins of a mainstream festival — which it's now eclipsed. But nearly 80 years on, performers and spectators say rising costs threaten the Fringe's alternative vibe. -
On a state visit, France's president announced the loan of the tapestry embroidered with scenes of the 1066 Norman invasion. It will return to the U.K. for the first time in more than 900 years. -
They were on opposite sides during Syria's civil war and now must do lifesaving work together. A makeshift brick wall divides them in their Damascus fire station. The psychological wall is higher. -
In a Damascus firehouse, former regime firefighters work side by side with the White Helmets. They were on opposite sides of Syria's war, and struggle with prejudices & fears -- as they work together to build a new country.
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With a war in Ukraine and the U.S. rethinking alliances, Britain and the European Union may need each other more than they thought. Here's what happened at Monday's summit — and what didn't. -
Justice Patrick Hodge said five judges at the court had ruled unanimously that "the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex." -
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. -
The U.K. exports explosive devices, guns and fighter jet components to Israel. But it's suspending some arms shipments, fearing Israel could used them in violation of international law. -
After more than a week of race riots across the UK, police are now deployed around the capital London amid fresh threats there from the far-right.
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A centrist human rights lawyer with working class roots, Keir Starmer is poised to be the first Labour leader to win a U.K. election in nearly 20 years.
