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 farmer dies feeding this country, but no one fights for the farmer," says a woman whose son, a farmer, died by suicide. He was $40,000 in debt. Her husband died of a heart attack days later. -
It's India's Kumbh Mela festival, which is expected to draw a record 15 million pilgrims this year, all looking to take a dip in the sacred Ganges and Yamuna rivers. -
Protests erupted across south India after women sneaked into a temple that banned females old enough to menstruate. The temple is part of a debate between gender equality and religious freedom.
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In Kerala, a part of India known as "land of coconuts," male coconut pickers are turning to other jobs. Women are among the new trainees. -
No women ages 10 to 50 have been able to reach the temple since the ruling in September. "I'll block younger women with my own body if I have to," says a woman who waited until age 53 to visit. -
A Roman Catholic nun says a bishop raped her multiple times between 2014 and 2016. The bishop denies wrongdoing and is out on bail. Some Indian Catholics are blaming the nun for tarnishing the church. -
Couples who marry against their parents' wishes sometimes risk their lives in doing so. That's where the Love Commandos come in. They run 500 safe houses and help couples elope or hide from relatives. -
Indian media has identified the man as either an "adventure tourist" or a Christian missionary who landed on remote and restricted North Sentinel in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. -
Each fall, Indian farmers burn the stubble of rice plants — a fast way to clear fields. But the smoke adds to India's awful air pollution. -
Just three weeks after being sworn in, Mahinda Rajapksa faced a hostile parliament with a majority of lawmakers still loyal to his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe.
