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 Boeing 737 with 190 people aboard skids off the runway and plunges down a 35-foot slope — leaving the airliner cracked in two. -
India's prime minister laid the cornerstone of a Hindu temple that is being built on the ruins of a mosque destroyed by Hindu extremists — a gesture painful to Muslims, hundreds of whom died there.
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The 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu extremists sparked riots that killed thousands of Muslims, leaving a deep rift between the country's religious communities. -
India's Narendra Modi lays the cornerstone for a Hindu temple built on the ruins of a 16th century mosque destroyed by Hindu extremists, where hundreds of Indian Muslims died.
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Some Indians became known TikTok personalities and even earned money and gifts for their content. The government banned the app as tensions flare with China. -
Despite one the world's earliest and most restrictive lockdowns, India's numbers continue to soar, exceeded only by the United States and Brazil. -
The American call for racial justice has led to a heated debate over attitudes about skin tones — and caused some lightening creams, like Fair & Lovely from Unilever, to change their names. -
The journey from India can zigzag to Russia, the Mideast, the Caribbean and Central America. U.S. Border Patrol figures show more than 7,600 Indians were detained on the U.S.-Mexico border last year. -
The Trump administration urges schools to reopen in the fall. Immigration and Customs Enforcement rules say international students can't stay in the U.S. if their schools are entirely online.
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Despite imposing one of the earliest and most severe mitigation efforts in the world, India's coronavirus infections have soared.
