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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Engineers at MIT developed an electric, shareable car that would fold to conserve parking spaces. A prototype was made for production in Europe. But why did this promising auto never hit the road? -
Refugees from both sides of Syria's civil war are among those now streaming into Europe. It makes for some sensitive discussions along the migrant trail. -
While European leaders hold a summit to discuss the tens of thousands of migrants and refugees streaming into the continent, many migrants remain stranded on the border between Slovenia and Austria.
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The volunteers, who have come from as far away as Australia, have set up a makeshift kitchen, where they cook thousands of hot meals and shuttle them to refugee camps. -
Migrants struggling north through the Balkans say they've departed late in the season, despite wintry weather, because of violence in once-safe areas of Syria and Iraq.
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While Hungarian authorities are transporting some migrants directly to Austria, they are also arresting others for illegal entry — and deporting them after brief court proceedings. -
Forget the goulash. Budapest's restaurants have been featuring refugee cuisine — think Syrian sweets, Afghan pies and Eritrean flatbread. It's a festival to foster understanding through food. -
Hungary put up border fences to keep migrants out. But in a limited way, it's helping some migrants transit through Hungary, getting them to Austria and closer to their Northern European destinations.
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Pope Francis has called on all of Europe's Catholics to take in refugees. In Hungary, church leaders have been hesitant, and Catholic churches are conspicuously absent from relief efforts. -
Migrants from as far away as Afghanistan have been placed behind barbed wire in detention camps in Hungary. NPR's Lauren Frayer visits a camp where the numbers — and the frustrations — keep growing.
