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.
-
Ahead of a vote, a wild-haired populist has split conservatives. Born rich, he vows to fight for the working class. He points out Obama's Kenyan roots. He's not Trump. He's London Mayor Boris Johnson.
-
Gibraltar is a peninsula attached to Spain, but its 30,000 residents have British passports — and could tip the scales in a close vote this June on leaving the European Union. -
Spain's prime minister says it's time to end the midafternoon break and move to a more 9-to-5 workday. But many Spaniards say the siesta is an outdated stereotype that's no longer part of daily life. -
Back in 2003, Cuba jailed 75 journalists and activists for having contact with the United States. They've been freed into exile in Spain, where they're still pushing for democracy in Cuba, from afar. -
Turkey and the European Union struck a deal intended to halt the uncontrolled influx of asylum seekers to Europe. NPR's Lauren Frayer explains how the agreement aims to level out the "irregular" flow.
-
After some opposition, European Union leaders at the summit in Brussels are finalizing an agreement with Turkey aimed at helping Syrian refugees fleeing war.
-
Rita Bosaho is a nurse turned politician, born in Equatorial Guinea but raised by a white foster family in Spain. "I hope I can empower minorities," she says. -
Bashar Assad claims more than 80 countries are supporting extremists in his country. He says he would welcome a pause in the fighting, but would still attack groups like ISIS. -
A royal trial is underway on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Spain's Princess Cristina faces 8 years in prison if convicted of tax fraud. She's the first Spanish royal to sit in the defendant's dock.
-
The man who was tripped by a kick from a Hungarian camerawoman is now rebuilding his life in Spain. He's learning Spanish, working at a soccer academy — and trying to reunite his family.
