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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Generations of Indian schoolkids have read Kabuliwala — the tale of an Afghan migrant in India. The story remains timely today with mistreatment of migrants, especially Muslims, on the rise.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi says his government will withdraw sweeping farm law changes that provoked widespread protests and posed a significant political challenge to his administration.
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India's capital is under partial lockdown because of a health emergency. But it's not COVID-19. It's air pollution that has exceeded four times what's safe.
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Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal state, is one of Narendra Modi's fiercest critics. She's especially beloved by women and the impoverished. But gaining national traction may be tough. -
Unusually heavy rains. Toxic smog. A poisoned river in the capital New Delhi. India's rapid development has left it with many environmental challenges, on top of erratic weather from climate change.
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20 nations are responsible for 80% of the world's carbon emissions. Ahead of the COP26 climate summit, we look at what China, India and Brazil — three of the world's biggest emitters — are doing.
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As the West moves away from coal, India still relies on it for 70% of its power. Rising energy demands & global price fluctuations have led to an acute coal shortage, threatening widespread blackouts.
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India is celebrating its 1 billionth COVID-19 vaccination. But only a third of its population is fully-inoculated, and export orders are backed up.
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The priestesses are part of a feminist push to make Hinduism more inclusive. Some have begun officiating at Indian weddings stripped of patriarchal traditions: No more "donating" brides to in-laws. -
In the 20th century, Air India embodied the dreams of a newly independent nation. In the 21st, it embodied its challenges. The Indian government has sold its bankrupt airline.
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President Biden hosts the leaders of Japan, Australia and India at the White House on Friday. The four key democracies are teaming up to counter China, which is also a major trading partner.
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President Biden hosts the leaders of Japan, Australia and India at the White House on Friday. The four key democracies are teaming up to counter China, which is also a major trading partner.
