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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A virtual reality project helps survivors of India's Partition glimpse long-lost birthplaces they fled as children. Fraught relations between India and Pakistan mean they can't visit in person. -
Two Pakistani friends make videos in which those who lived through India's 1947 Partition describe loved ones they lost at the time. With viewers' help, siblings and others are reunited after decades. -
Sri Lanka offers a cautionary tale for countries struggling with inflation. Anger over fuel lines spilled into the streets and toppled a government. Will nationalism surge, or unity prevail? -
Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has tendered his resignation amid an economic crisis and violent protests against he and his brother, the country's president. -
Some schools have closed early for summer. More than a billion people are in danger of heatstroke. Summer's early arrival in South Asia also threatens global grain supplies. -
Ukraine's military has been inundated with volunteers. That includes women, who are not required as men are to stay and fight the Russian invasion. -
The lead singer in Ukraine's biggest rock band is one of Ukrainian celebrities who are using their fame and connections to speed relief supplies to those who need them most. -
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. -
"People, children are under the wreckage. Atrocity!" the president tweeted. The port city's deputy mayor also said Russia's military had violated a cease-fire meant to allow civilians to evacuate. -
At church, Ukrainians pray for an end to war. But a rift is forming: The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has defended Moscow's invasion. Some in Ukraine want to break away from his leadership.
