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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Efforts to make the world’s biggest music festival sustainable affect everything from trash pickup to wheelchair access to child safety. Is it possible for 200,000+ campers to "leave no trace?"
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NPR takes listeners on a tour of the world’s biggest music fest: 200,000+ campers in a muddy field, rocking out. In recent years, Glastonbury has gone plastic-free, family-friendly and accessible for all.
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Without the European Union to blame, Britain is confronting its own decline. The next prime minister inherits a country that, without London, would be poorer than Mississippi.
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In the Democratic Republic of Congo, three Americans are among dozens of people on trial for a failed coup attempt. NPR's Lauren Frayer talks to independent journalist Emmet Livingstone.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer talks with Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg about how healthcare hacks are on the increase after a major attack against Change Healthcare earlier this year.
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New fathers Alex Thompson, Andy Cottrell, Dave Bluhm, and Colton Canton reflect on becoming dads.
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NPR explores a secret vault under London’s Old War Office, where the UK kept fake passports for undercover agents abroad. Behind door #007 is where Ian Fleming hatched his famous character in WWII.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer talks to soccer commentator Roger Bennett about the two major international soccer tournament this summer: the European Championship and Copa America, which the US will host.
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NPR's Lauren Frayer speaks with actors Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen and Katherine Mallen Kupferer, a real family of actors, about playing a fictional family in the new movie "Ghostlight."
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NPR's Lauren Frayer talks with John Vercher about his new novel, "Devil Is Fine," in which a grieving father's sense of reality shifts with a sudden, surprising, and disturbing inheritance.