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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Tributes were paid. But for many of the queen's former colonial subjects, her life and death are a reminder of a painful history of exploitation and racism. Others just didn't give it much thought. -
Nearly 2,000 people crowded Westminster Abbey for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. A long procession through London carried her coffin to a final resting place at Windsor Castle, 25 miles away.
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India held a day of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II. But her death has largely prompted indifference, or even anger, in the Commonwealth's biggest country.
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China's Xi Jinping, Russia's Vladimir Putin and India's Narendra Modi are among the world leaders in Uzbekistan for a security forum. What unites them is a distrust of the American-led world order.
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When her high school banned the hijab, Ayesha Shifa sued. Her case went to India's Supreme Court. A verdict, expected soon, could redefine what secularism means in the world's largest democracy.
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A Chinese survey ship docked this week at the Hambantota port, built with Chinese loans. Some worry the ship's arrival may signal the start of militarization of Chinese infrastructure in Sri Lanka.
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As Sri Lanka negotiates an IMF bailout, another creditor waits in the wings: China. Beijing has funded infrastructure on the island, and it is poised to invest more. That makes the West nervous.
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As India turns 75, its democracy — the world's largest — is under threat from authoritarian rule.
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More than seven decades ago, colonial India was partitioned into two new nations — Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. There was a massive migration between the two — and bloodshed.
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With virtual reality headsets, elderly survivors of the partition between India and Pakistan are getting 360-degree views of their long-lost homes — on opposite sides of the international border.
