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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Her father got injured. She came to care for him and took him home via bike. Now she's reportedly signed to star in a Bollywood film based on her life. But some ask: Why was this her only option? -
Black Lives Matter movement has sparked a change in Indian society — from Bollywood celebrities tweeting support for racial justice in the U.S. to manufacturers nixing popular skin-whitening creams.
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As the Black Lives Matter movement prompts reckonings about race around the world, India's most popular skin lightening cream is removing the words 'fair,' 'white' and 'light' from its marketing. -
Last year, Indians received 72% of H-1B visas. Thousands who'd planned to come to the U.S. this year must scrap or delay their plans. But some suggest the freeze may work to India's advantage. -
With 12,881 new infections, Thursday's daily tally is India's highest so far. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ruled out another national lockdown, saying it's too painful for the economy. -
India says 20 of its troops are dead after a confrontation with Chinese soldiers on the two countries' disputed border, high in the Himalayas. It was the first deadly clash there in decades.
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India says 20 of its troops are dead after a confrontation with Chinese soldiers on the two countries' disputed border, high in the Himalayas. It was the first deadly clash there in decades.
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The fighting, which reportedly involved stone-throwing and batons rather than bullets, occurred Monday night. It follows weeks of scuffles between Indian and Chinese troops along the border. -
Many garment factories have reopened, but the coronavirus still affects global demand and orders remain canceled. "I need to work," says one employee. "I'll die of hunger before I die of this virus." -
Bangladesh has extended its coronavirus lockdown — except for the garment factories. But with global brands canceling orders, workers face pay cuts, hunger and little to no social distancing.
