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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The Princess of Wales admits she edited a family photo issued by the palace. News agencies retracted the photo over concerns it was digitally manipulated.
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An unlikely friendship began between a Gaza woman in grief and the Irish graffiti artist and activist who painted her as a mural in Dublin.
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A U.S. academic's recipe for the perfect cup of tea has sent Brits into a tizzy. Salt? Warm milk? The horror!
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Prince Harry and 100 other celebrities sued UK tabloids for allegedly hacking their phones to get scoops in the 1990s & early 2000s.
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Greece's prime minister cut a U.K. visit short after an apparent snub by his U.K. counterpart over the Elgin Marbles — sculptures taken from the Parthenon, now housed at the British Museum.
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The Hindi-language film industry is famous for romantic comedies filled with singing and dancing. Sometimes, Bollywood films are more than pure entertainment — they can offer a blueprint for love.
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A jury in London acquitted Spacey on Wednesday after 12 hours of deliberations. On hearing the verdict, Spacey wiped away tears and mouthed the words "thank you" to the jury.
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Controversy has erupted at one of India's top film festivals over the screening of a movie with Hindu nationalist themes. Were the jury head's comments an artistic critique or political commentary?
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On top of the humanitarian crisis, Ukrainians worry about Russian destruction of cultural heritage sites. In Lviv, they're wrapping statues in fireproof material to protect them from Russian bombs.
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In his Kennedy Center show, Das spoke of two sides of his native India: rich and poor, united but divided over women's rights and more. It was a hit in D.C., but brought legal trouble in India.