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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The world's worst cyclones hit Bangladesh. Floods are devastating. Yet death tolls are falling. The country's climate disaster strategies offer lessons for all coastal communities. -
The head of India's main opposition party has been disqualified from parliament after a court convicted him of defaming Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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Car chases in India, violent protests in the U.S. and U.K. — over a popular Sikh preacher on the run. India and its diaspora have been captivated by a manhunt for a charismatic separatist leader.
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It was the longest diplomatic gap in the history of U.S.- Indian relations, at a time when the two countries say they're closer than ever before
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Firefighters are carrying victims out of the wreckage on stretchers. Officials are investigating the cause of the blast. Two other recent explosions were blamed on gas leaks.
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India wants to steer talks away from Russia, with which it's maintained ties despite the Ukraine invasion. Russia's top diplomat walked out of a previous G-20 summit over criticism of the war.
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With a new refugee crisis in Ukraine, the Rohingya, who fled Myanmar for Bangladesh years ago, feel as if no one pays heed to their plight. Now thousands are risking their lives to flee once more.
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As the West isolates Russian President Vladimir Putin, India has doubled down on buying Russian oil. India's prime minister calls his country's friendship with Moscow "unbreakable."
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Press freedom advocates around the world have decried this week's raids on the BBC — in which journalists and accountants alike were questioned, and had their phones and laptops searched.
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Around 10 BBC employees had been sleeping in their office since Tuesday. Some of the tax agents stayed overnight too. They searched laptops and phones of some journalists and administrative staff.
