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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India is repealing controversial farm laws that sparked a year of protest from farmers. Analysts say it's both a victory for nonviolent resistance, and a shrewd political move. -
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. -
India's capital is under partial lockdown because of a health emergency. But it's not COVID-19. It's air pollution that has exceeded four times what's safe.
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New Delhi's schools are already closed this week because of air pollution that has been about four times the safe limit. -
Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal state, is one of Narendra Modi's fiercest critics. She's especially beloved by women and the impoverished. But gaining national traction may be tough. -
India is celebrating its 1 billionth COVID-19 vaccination. But only a third of its population is fully-inoculated, and export orders are backed up.
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The priestesses are part of a feminist push to make Hinduism more inclusive. Some have begun officiating at Indian weddings stripped of patriarchal traditions: No more "donating" brides to in-laws. -
The Taliban's ideology has distant links to India. Scholars say Afghanistan's new leaders might listen to clerics in the birthplace of Deobandi Islam, though the clerics deny ties with the Taliban. -
For India, the power shift in Kabul may mean a loss of security, as well as a loss of economic power and influence in a region increasingly dominated by another neighbor that it's uneasy about: China. -
Afghans in New Delhi have watched with horror as the Taliban take back control of Afghanistan, and they want to help relatives escape. But many refugees can't get work permits in India.
