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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Posh private hospitals give world-class care — and serve lattes. At government facilities, cancer patients sleep on the sidewalk. But the prime minister has a plan to help the poor. -
Activists are challenging the law, which dates back to the British colonial era. More Indian cities are hosting gay pride parades, but some polls show most Indians still frown on homosexuality. -
In recent months, about two dozen people across India have been beaten to death by mobs driven to violence by what they've read on social media and messaging apps. -
In Mumbai, beaches are strewn with plastic trash, so now there's a ban on plastics — and penalties for violators. But there are some exceptions. -
India's smash hit Veere Di Wedding breaks lots of taboos — and is stirring up debate about its depiction of women.
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He's known as "one of the most virtuous and wise sons" of Bristol, but the philanthropist Edward Colston made his fortune as a 17th century slave trader. Many want his name erased from city landmarks. -
Nearly three years after Ireland voted to legalize same-sex marriage, the country is due to hold another referendum this spring on whether to legalize abortion.
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The future status of the United Kingdom's border with Ireland is once again proving a huge obstacle in the long process of Britain leaving the European Union.
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Budgets are tight, wait times have grown and drugs are being rationed. But most of the U.K. believes the advantages of their taxpayer-funded coverage outweigh the frustrations. -
Ireland has already legalized divorce and same-sex marriage. Will abortion be next? In a May referendum, voters will weigh in on whether to allow unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy.
