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.
-
The new Spanish parliament looks very different than its predecessor. The assembly now has its first black MP, a physicist who uses a wheelchair and a record number of female lawmakers.
-
Princess Cristina, the sister of Spain's king, is accused of tax fraud. She is the first Spanish royal to be charged with a crime and has become a symbol of corruption in Spain's ruling elite. -
Ham is the most popular family gift at Christmastime in Spain. And some Spaniards are feeling defiant after the World Health Organization's warning that processed meats are linked to cancer. -
For a generation of young Spaniards, temporary employment has become the new normal. As voters head to the polls on Sunday, many are wondering if that should really count as recovery. -
Spain's lackluster prime minister suffered a setback at the polls over the weekend. His party won the most votes in Sunday's elections, but fell short of a majority.
-
Abengoa, a large renewable energy company with a huge solar plant in Arizona, is in danger of becoming Spain's biggest bankruptcy case of all time. -
France is the world's most-visited country, but thousands of tourists have canceled trips since the Paris attacks. Big conventions have been postponed. Music acts like U2 have canceled concerts. -
As the French government is pressured to prevent another attack, the prosecutor's office says the organizer of the attacks is dead. Tension from the attacks has spread to other European countries.
-
France observes 3 days of official mourning for the victims of Friday's terrorist attacks in Paris. The archbishop of Paris celebrated a mass Sunday with victims' families at Notre Dame cathedral.
-
As France grieves the victims of Friday's terror attacks, police are still searching for a suspect who is believed to have survived.
