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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Video from a meeting in northern India shows Hindu leaders calling for attacks on Muslims. The crowd included politicians with ties to Prime Minister Modi. Two men have been arrested for hate speech.
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India isn't famous for snow sports. Kashmiri ski racer Arif Khan hopes to change that. The first and so far only Indian to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, he crowdfunded trips to Europe to qualify.
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India's COVID-19 caseload is quickly rising, as omicron threatens the country's already precarious health system.
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Health experts worldwide are warning that the battle against the Omicron variant is far from over. Three NPR correspondents provide the latest on the pandemic from Europe and South Asia.
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Bangladesh has gone from what U.S. diplomats called a "basket case" to a rising economy in Asia. The IMF says its GDP may soon exceed Denmark's and Singapore's. -
You may have heard of India's famous beer, Kingfisher. But wine? In the tropics? With spicy curries? Sula Vineyards is India's leading winemaker.
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An investigation is underway into Wednesday's helicopter crash that killed India's top military leader — along with 12 other people, including his wife.
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The killings of more than a dozen tribal people by Indian forces threaten a shaky ceasefire in one of the world's longest-running struggles for self-determination by indigenous people.
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Kids in Delhi, India, have been indoors for 20 months –- first for COVID, now for smog beyond four times what's safe. Officials have installed towers to filter it, but scientists say they don't work.
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A postcard from India's oldest and largest Chinese community, where residents are feeling recent tensions between Delhi and Beijing.
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India is repealing controversial farm laws that sparked a year of protest from farmers. Analysts say it's both a victory for nonviolent resistance, and a shrewd political move. -
Some see the repeal of India's controversial farm laws as a victory for non-violent protest. Others say reform is still needed. What's next for the Indian farmers who've spent a year protesting?
