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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Renovations at London's National Gallery have unearthed a posthumous letter from a donor. In it, he trashes the design of the wing he funded.
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Lord Sainsbury didn’t like the design of the wing his family funded. He paid for it though, and slipped a 1990 letter into a pillar during construction. Construction workers found it 33 years later. -
Oasis is getting back together. It's been 15 years since the 90s Britpop band, led by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, played their last gig together.
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Before Ted Lasso and Wrexham, there was Watford FC – a 4th-tier soccer team in a blighted UK town. In 1976, its fortunes were reversed when the club was bought by a local fan – Elton John.
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Six people are known to be missing, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his daughter, and Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife.
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Fans in friendship bracelets have descended on the U.K. capital, where Taylor Swift has played more concerts as part of her Eras Tour than any other city.
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Race riots have erupted not in London, but in deprived second-tier U.K. cities with wage stagnation and new migrants. Experts on extremism say they've become fertile ground for far-right recruiting.
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After more than a week of race riots across the UK, police are now deployed around the capital London amid fresh threats there from the far-right.
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Dozens more far-right rallies are planned across the United Kingdom on Wednesday, as police struggle to contain racist mob violence targeting immigrants, Muslims and people of color.
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In several British cities over the past week, racist mobs have attacked mosques, hotels housing immigrants — or anyone of color. The riots that have been enflamed by misinformation online.
