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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Dozens of Indians, most of them Muslim, have been killed by police in weeks of nationwide protests against a new citizenship law. Their families believe they were singled out because of their faith. -
Dozens of Indians have been killed by police in weeks of nationwide protests. Most are Muslims whose families say they were singled out by forces loyal to the Hindu nationalist government.
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After a 2012 gang rape on a New Delhi bus, India increased prison terms for rape. But ghastly cases still dominate the news, and most rape still goes unreported — and unprosecuted.
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The men were convicted of the notorious 2012 attack on a college student, who has become known in Indian media as "Nirbhaya," or "The Fearless One." -
Protesters say the weekend attack at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University was carried out by Hindu nationalists linked to the country's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, a charge the BJP denies. -
Researchers say the country's fixation on the rape of urban women in public settings distorts the reality of sexual violence in India. -
The mass demonstrations followed violence that erupted Sunday night, as police stormed a public university in New Delhi. -
The marches cap nearly a week of protests over the new citizenship law, which grants amnesty to non-Muslim migrants. Critics say the measure discriminates against Muslims.
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A Chinese state-owned operator took control of a port on a 99-year lease after Sri Lanka defaulted on its loans. An adviser to Sri Lanka's president said the government wants China to "give it back." -
Mohammad Taslim tried to warn authorities about other Muslims who'd been radicalized. He was shot soon after. Two men he flagged are now under arrest for links to Sri Lanka's Easter terrorist attacks.
