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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The Princess of Wales admits she edited a family photo issued by the palace. News agencies retracted the photo over concerns it was digitally manipulated.
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Why is Ireland one of the most pro-Palestinian nations in the world? A shared history of occupation, sectarian conflict — and past experience with a U.K. colonial official named Balfour.
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Artist Emmalene Blake's mural on the wall of a Dublin pub became an iconic image of Gaza's grief. Then one day, she got an Instagram message from the Palestinian woman in the image. -
On Tuesday, a U.K. court began hearing arguments on whether Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the United States. The U.S. has charged Assange with espionage.
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A hearing in a London court will determine whether Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States. Might the the WikiLeaks founder soon face espionage charges in an American courtroom?
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In Britain, people worry as Houthi attacks on shipping routes in the Red Sea threaten supply chains for their national drink.
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An unlikely friendship began between a Gaza woman in grief and the Irish graffiti artist and activist who painted her as a mural in Dublin.
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Less than 18 months into his reign, King Charles is suspending public duties. Buckingham Palace says he'll continue the paperwork of state business as he undergoes outpatient treatment for cancer.
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King Charles III has been diagnosed with cancer and began treatment Monday, Buckingham Palace says. -
The Jenin Freedom Theatre was ransacked by Israeli soldiers, its staff thrown in jail. Once celebrated as a peace initiative, it's the latest casualty of near-daily military raids on the West Bank.
