
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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After President Trump complained, India reversed its export ban on the anti-malaria drug, which Trump has touted as a coronavirus treatment. There's no clinical evidence it works against COVID-19.
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The virus is upending burial traditions across cultures, from the washing of the body of a loved one in Iraq to the gathering of mourners in Israel.
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"Please don't give up on us," the president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association said in a YouTube plea addressed to global buyers. "Kindly do not let go of our hands."
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Per capita, India has fewer hospital beds and ventilators than almost any country in the world. Medical professionals fear the government's promised $2 billion health care revamp will be too late.
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Billions of Indians face a strict lockdown. Those in quarantine have their own set of concerns about unsafe conditions.
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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi announces Tuesday, in a nationwide address, that he's putting the entire country on a 21-day lockdown in response to the coronavirus.
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Days after what many call a pogrom in India's capital, schools and mosques are charred and thousands of mostly Muslims are homeless. Hindu nationalists and police are accused of inciting violence.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host Trump for a two-day visit starting Monday. As Gujarat's chief minister, Modi oversaw impressive economic growth. But he also presided over a dark chapter.
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Dozens of Indians, most of them Muslim, have been killed by police in weeks of nationwide protests against a new citizenship law. Their families believe they were singled out because of their faith.
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Clashes began Sunday, when local officials from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party vowed to clear anti-government protesters from the capital.