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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Tens of thousands of Indian farmers are protesting for a ninth straight day. They accuse the government of using the coronavirus crisis to push through market-based changes without consulting them. -
How tall is Mount Everest? It varies with seismic activity and climate change. China and Nepal have remeasured the world's tallest mountain, and will announce their findings.
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Facebook is accused of failing to censor illegal hate speech by Hindu nationalist politicians in order to preserve relations with India's ruling party and government.
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From his home in New York, celebrity chef Vikas Khanna has launched a food drive during COVID-19, feeding millions in his native India.
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India has reported the second most coronavirus cases in the world, behind the U.S. And its economy shrank 24% last spring. Yet the country's prime minister is as popular as ever.
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The race to develop COVID-19 vaccines is moving swiftly, both nationally and internationally. But challenges remain when it comes to distributing vaccines around the world.
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Only one other country — the United States — has surpassed the milestone of 9 million total cases, since the pandemic began. -
Harris will not only be the first Black, and first female, vice president. She's also the first Indian American and the first Asian American elected to the office. -
Firecrackers erupted Sunday in a tiny village surrounded by lush green rice paddies in southern India, where Kamala Harris' maternal grandfather was born. -
Local sources say there's been a spike in child marriage during the pandemic. A key reason: By marrying off girls early, poor families have one less mouth to feed in desperate times.
