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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The elaborate funeral pyres of India, the seven-day mourning among Jews in Israel and the sacred body washing of Muslims in Iraq, are all important rituals of death now in disarray amid the pandemic.
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"Please don't give up on us," the president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association said in a YouTube plea addressed to global buyers. "Kindly do not let go of our hands." -
Amid a 21-day lockdown to help control the spread of the coronavirus, millions of workers in India's cities have no income, no food — and so are heading back to their villages. -
Indian highways are lined with migrant laborers trying to walk hundreds of miles home to their villages. Left without work or transport, they're vulnerable to starvation — and coronavirus infection.
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India has fewer hospital beds and ventilators per capita than almost any other country. Rural hospitals lack basic sanitation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is promising $2 billion for health care.
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Per capita, India has fewer hospital beds and ventilators than almost any country in the world. Medical professionals fear the government's promised $2 billion health care revamp will be too late. -
Billions of Indians face a strict lockdown. Those in quarantine have their own set of concerns about unsafe conditions. -
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces Tuesday, in a nationwide address, that he's putting the entire country on a 21-day lockdown in response to the coronavirus.
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Police are accused of failing to protect Muslim citizens during deadly riots that erupted during President Trump's visit to India last month. More than 50 died in the violence. -
Days after what many call a pogrom in India's capital, schools and mosques are charred and thousands of mostly Muslims are homeless. Hindu nationalists and police are accused of inciting violence.
