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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With more residents staying indoors, fewer Indians are dying from road and train accidents, leading to a drop in overall mortality. Crime is also down. -
When India began the world's largest lockdown in March, it threw call centers into chaos as employees couldn't commute to work. Now millions are adapting to work from home, amid security challenges. -
In India, Muslims have been accused of deliberately spreading the virus. Many say they have faced increased discrimination, harassment and attacks. -
The U.S. government is spending over $2 trillion to help the nation overcome the coronavirus economic shutdown. NPR correspondents in India, Mexico and Germany relay what other governments are doing.
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After a Muslim missionary meeting in Delhi led to a COVID-19 outbreak in India, Hindu nationalists are blaming all Muslims for the virus. #coronajihad is trending and there are reports of mob attacks.
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India call centers provide tech support to credit card companies, airlines and even police and fire departments in the United States. They too have had to adapt under coronavirus lockdown.
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In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Indians they must remain at home through May 3. -
After President Trump complained, India reversed its export ban on the anti-malaria drug, which Trump has touted as a coronavirus treatment. There's no clinical evidence it works against COVID-19. -
After President Trump complained, India reversed its export ban on the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which the U.S. president touts as a coronavirus treatment.
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The virus is upending burial traditions across cultures, from the washing of the body of a loved one in Iraq to the gathering of mourners in Israel.
