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's homegrown COVID-19 vaccine has been controversial because the Indian government approved its use before clinical trials showed it works. Now data is finally out.
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Demonstrations have been going on for months. Pop stars and climate activists have pledged support for the farmers. What sparked the movement is less glamorous: New rules for wholesale markets. -
Twitter blocked hundreds of accounts the Indian government said were inciting violence. Then it unblocked them. Now it's stuck between Indian law and defending free speech. -
A landslide in the Himalayas in Northern India has killed at least two dozen people and more than 150 are missing.
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At least 140 people are missing after a hydroelectric dam near the glacier was swept away in a deluge of water, rock and debris. "It came very fast. There was no time to alert anyone," a witness said.
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They've got to reach urban dwellers as well as the two-thirds of Indians living in rural areas — and deal with vaccine hesitancy. Here's an early progress report on successes — and hiccups. -
By July, India aims to vaccinate 300 million of its 1.4 billion people. But with COVID-19 infections already declining, some Indians don't see the need — and clinics have more doses than recipients.
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From 100,000 cases a day in September, India is now down to about 10,000 a day. Is it climate? Demographics? Mask mandates? Scientists are looking for answers. -
Tens of thousands of Indian farmers protesting agriculture reforms drove tractors into New Delhi on Tuesday, clashing with police and overshadowing a military parade on a national holiday.
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Tens of thousands of Indian farmers had been protesting on the outskirts of New Delhi for months. On Tuesday, they stormed the city, overshadowing a military parade on a national holiday.
