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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A day after Saturday's U.S. strikes, Venezuelans describe fear, confusion, and long lines for fuel and food.
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NPR's Charles Maynes in Moscow on how the White House's Russia rhetoric shifted this year and how it is landing in Moscow.
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Climate change is warming Europe, but scientists are also studying whether a weakened Atlantic current could make Britain colder, with Laurie Laybourne, director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative in southwest England.
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Author Matt Greene on his new dystopian novel 'The Definitions' about life after a virus wipes people's memories.
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Arab Barghouthi, the son of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi, on his father's life in Israeli prison and the stalemate after nearly two decades without elections.
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A day after the operation in Venezuela, the White House is clarifying what running the country means, as Congress splits sharply along party lines.
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Who is in charge in Venezuela after the US seized and ousted its president? Manuel Rueda reports from Bogotá, Colombia.
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The world's longest-running radio drama turns 75 in January. 'The Archers' chronicles a fictional farming family in England, navigating climate change, mental health and romance.
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Doctors in England say they'll go on strike Wednesday. Their five-day action coincides with a spike in flu cases. The government says crowded hospitals are preparing for a "worst case scenario."
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President Trump's brusque criticisms against Europe are calling into question America's relationship with some of its oldest allies and drawing reactions from its leaders.