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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With tensions rising over North Korea's nuclear program, you might expect a kind of panic in South Korea. But there's an altogether different scene happening in Seoul ahead of the election. -
From a golf course in South Korea, the U.S. can now shoot down North Korean missiles. But residents don't want a missile defense system in their backyard — and neither does China. -
The heir to Samsung is in jail on bribery charges. Ex-president Park Geun-hye was impeached late last year, removed from office in March and her corruption trial got underway this week.
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With their impeached president on trial for corruption, South Korean voters will decide how pro-U.S. her replacement should be — as President Trump and North Korea trade threats of war. -
Portugal's economy has rebounded dramatically since its European Union bailout in 2011. Wages are up and unemployment down. What's surprising is that this happened only as austerity was canceled. -
Since 2001, possession or use of any drug has been treated as a health issue in Portugal. The country's drug-induced death rate has plummeted to five times lower than the European Union average. -
Half of all cars in Europe run on diesel, compared to 3 percent in the U.S. But Madrid has vowed to ban diesel vehicles by 2025, to cut air pollution. Paris and Athens have made similar pledges. -
Amid the rise of far-right political parties in Europe, Spain has no similar movement. That may be due to its history under a dictatorship and Spaniards' own experience as impoverished migrants. -
Many complain their magnificent city is being ruined by tourism. Some 30 million visitors arrive every year, bringing much-needed revenue — but crowding out longtime residents and businesses. -
Ada Colau is a former Occupy activist, once arrested for blocking home evictions during Spain's economic crisis. Now she's Barcelona's mayor, a job in which, she says, "you're closest to the people."
