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.
-
It was a day of aftershocks, funerals and frantic rescues Sunday in Morocco. More than 2,100 people are confirmed dead since Friday's earthquake.
-
We look at the latest conditions in Morocco, where a major earthquake near the city of Marrakech has resulted in at least 2,000 deaths.
-
A manhunt is on in the U.K. for a terror suspect whose cinematic prison break has captivated the country. Former soldier Daniel Khalife escaped from a London prison strapped under a food truck.
-
Authorities found straps dangling from a truck that left a prison kitchen early Wednesday. The suspect, last seen wearing a chef's uniform, is an ex-soldier accused of planting fake bombs and spying. -
The Hindi-language film industry is famous for romantic comedies filled with singing and dancing. Sometimes, Bollywood films are more than pure entertainment — they can offer a blueprint for love.
-
Sanjoy Sachdev was lauded as India's cupid. But Sachdev and his group have became villains in the eyes of many of the people they promised to help. -
A group called Love Commandos helps couples who marry for love in India. NPR's Rough Translation podcast looks at the circumstances surrounding the group's downfall.
-
In recent years, there's been an influx of migrants crossing the sea border to England. The British government found a solution that critics are calling illegal: Deport them to Rwanda, Africa.
-
Spain defeated England to win its first title in the Women's World Cup.
-
A story of a group in India that helps young people escape arranged marriages and instead marry for love.
