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.
-
Even while the curfew was lifted, tanks patroled the streets amid a state of emergency. The Indian Ocean nation faces a political vacuum — on top of a severe economic crisis.
-
When her high school banned the hijab, Ayesha Shifa sued — and her case went to India's Supreme Court. A verdict, expected soon, may redefine what secularism means in the world's largest democracy.
-
People in Sri Lanka have endured months of food and fuel shortages — the island nation's worst economic crisis in decades. The prime minister tendered his resignation amid violent protests.
-
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. -
Some schools have closed early for summer. Hospitals are on watch for heat stroke. South Asia is already hard-hit by climate change. Summer's early arrival this year also threatens the grain harvest.
-
Inflation isn't just an American problem — it's happening in places around the world and stretching some countries to the point of political unrest.Many
-
India has yet to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. wants to change. Leaders from both countries met virtually on Monday to discuss the war and other topics.
-
The U.S. wants India to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but so far the world's biggest democracy has not. India has deep ties with Moscow, some distrust of the West and big concerns about China.
-
Top diplomats from the U.S. and Russia are visiting India. They both want the backing of the world's biggest democracy — which has so far refused to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
-
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.
