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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New fathers Alex Thompson, Andy Cottrell, Dave Bluhm, and Colton Canton reflect on becoming dads.
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NPR explores a secret vault under London’s Old War Office, where the UK kept fake passports for undercover agents abroad. Behind door #007 is where Ian Fleming hatched his famous character in WWII.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer talks to soccer commentator Roger Bennett about the two major international soccer tournament this summer: the European Championship and Copa America, which the US will host.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks with actors Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen and Katherine Mallen Kupferer, a real family of actors, about playing a fictional family in the new movie "Ghostlight."
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NPR's Lauren Frayer talks with John Vercher about his new novel, "Devil Is Fine," in which a grieving father's sense of reality shifts with a sudden, surprising, and disturbing inheritance.
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As fighting escalates on the Israel-Lebanon border, NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks to Firas Maksad, senior fellow and senior director for strategic outreach at the Middle East Institute about the history.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks to Mujtaba Rahman, Europe director at the Eurasia Group, about the upcoming elections in the U.K. as well as the impact of a far-right swing in recent EU elections.
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Indian police accused Stan Swamy of terrorism. His supporters say he was framed and evidence planted on his computer. Some call it Narendra Modi's Watergate. Six years on, no one has resigned. -
The United Nations says 7,500 metric tons of unexploded ordnance litter the Gaza Strip. The U.N. says it could take 14 years to dispose of these dangers. -
Hamas said it accepted a proposal for a cease-fire. Israel responded that the deal didn't meet its requirements and announced it was pushing ahead with an assault in Rafah.
