Frank Langfitt
Frank Langfitt is NPR's London correspondent. He covers the UK and Ireland, as well as stories elsewhere in Europe.
Langfitt arrived in London in June 2016. A week later, the UK voted for Brexit. He's been busy ever since, covering the most tumultuous period in British politics in decades. Langfitt has reported on everything from Brexit's economic impact, Chinese influence campaigns and terror attacks to the renewed push for Scottish independence, political tensions in Northern Ireland and Megxit. Langfitt has contributed to NPR podcasts, including Consider This, The Indicator from Planet Money, Code Switch and Pop Culture Happy Hour. He also appears on the BBC and PBS Newshour.
Previously, Langfitt spent five years as an NPR correspondent covering China. Based in Shanghai, he drove a free taxi around the city for a series on a changing China as seen through the eyes of ordinary people. As part of the series, Langfitt drove passengers back to the countryside for Chinese New Year and served as a wedding chauffeur. He expanded his reporting into a book, The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China (Public Affairs, Hachette).
While in China, Langfitt also reported on the government's infamous "black jails" — secret detention centers — as well as his own travails taking China's driver's test, which he failed three times.
Before moving to Shanghai, Langfitt was NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi. He reported from Sudan, covered the civil war in Somalia, and interviewed imprisoned Somali pirates, who insisted they were just misunderstood fishermen. During the Arab Spring, Langfitt covered the uprising and crushing of the democracy movement in Bahrain.
Prior to Africa, Langfitt was NPR's labor correspondent based in Washington, DC. He covered coal mine disasters in West Virginia, the 2008 financial crisis and the bankruptcy of General Motors. His story with producer Brian Reed of how GM failed to learn from a joint-venture factory with Toyota was featured on This American Life and has been taught in business schools at Yale, Penn and NYU.
In 2008, Langfitt covered the Beijing Olympics as a member of NPR's team, which won an Edward R. Murrow Award for sports reporting. Langfitt's print and visual journalism have also been honored by the Overseas Press Association and the White House News Photographers Association.
Before coming to NPR, Langfitt spent five years as a correspondent in Beijing for The Baltimore Sun, covering a swath of Asia from East Timor to the Khyber Pass.
Langfitt spent his early years in journalism stringing for the Philadelphia Inquirer and living in Hazard, Kentucky, where he covered the state's Appalachian coalfields for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Prior to becoming a reporter, Langfitt dug latrines in Mexico and drove a taxi in his hometown of Philadelphia. Langfitt is a graduate of Princeton and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
-
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that England would go into lockdown for four weeks to stem surging coronavirus cases.
-
"We know that if we do not act now, it will continue to accelerate," the leader of Wales said. Gatherings are banned between people from different households, both indoors and outside.
-
As coronavirus infections spike in Europe, the U.K., which has the highest death toll among European countries, is imposing new restrictions in an effort to avoid a nationwide lockdown.
-
U.K. Musicians Protest Government's COVID-19 Response With MusicHundreds of musicians turned out to play an orchestral number across from Britain's parliament in a protest of the pandemic-related drop in government financial aid to freelancers like themselves.
-
QAnon, the Internet conspiracy theory, has spread across the Atlantic where it's helping fuel protests against coronavirus restrictions in the United Kingdom.
-
The United Kingdom and Germany are both European liberal democracies. Their political cultures, however, are very different, and that has been emphasized by each country's response to the coronavirus.
-
Two weeks after George Floyd's killing, protesters in Bristol, England, brought down the statue of a slave trader. NPR follows the ripples of America's racial justice protests across the Atlantic.
-
President Trump is not the only world leader to contract the coronavirus. The examples of the U.K.'s Boris Johnson and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro may have lessons for the U.S. at this moment.
-
British officials are sending their best wishes to President Trump and his wife after they tested positive for the coronavirus. Prime Minister Boris Johnson also tested positive earlier this year.
-
Health officials in a number of European countries are reporting sharp increases in coronavirus infections and are warning of more hospitalizations and deaths in the months ahead.