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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Some say it's a sign of prosperity. In conservative India, if women can afford not to work, they don't. But economists say there's more to it. -
Any day now, the United Nations will declare India's population the largest in the world. The country's next generation is poised to be healthier, more literate — and more female — than ever before. -
Vinod Kumar of India and Anish Adhikari of Nepal are among the many migrant workers who helped build the stadiums. Adhikari says he was misled about working conditions. Kumar died on the job. -
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? -
India, on track to become the world's most populous country, gets about 70% of its electricity from coal. But the government is aggressively investing in renewable energy — particularly solar. -
India's Hindu conservatives are championing Iran's female Muslim protesters. But they oppose Muslim students in southern India who are fighting for the right to wear the hijab in schools. -
People across India are cheering for Rishi Sunak, who has embraced his Indian and Hindu heritage, becoming the newest British prime minister. -
Tributes were paid. But for many of the queen's former colonial subjects, her life and death are a reminder of a painful history of exploitation and racism. Others just didn't give it much thought. -
When her high school banned the hijab, Ayesha Shifa sued. Her case went to India's Supreme Court. A verdict, expected soon, could redefine what secularism means in the world's largest democracy. -
A Chinese survey ship docked this week at the Hambantota port, built with Chinese loans. Some worry the ship's arrival may signal the start of militarization of Chinese infrastructure in Sri Lanka.
