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.
-
The priestesses are part of a feminist push to make Hinduism more inclusive. Some have begun officiating at Indian weddings stripped of patriarchal traditions: No more "donating" brides to in-laws. -
In the 20th century, Air India embodied the dreams of a newly independent nation. In the 21st, it embodied its challenges. The Indian government has sold its bankrupt airline.
-
New state laws make it harder for interfaith couples to marry. The idea is to halt forced marital religious conversions. But they've emboldened extremists to interrupt weddings.
-
President Biden hosts the leaders of Japan, Australia and India at the White House on Friday. The four key democracies are teaming up to counter China, which is also a major trading partner.
-
President Biden hosts the leaders of Japan, Australia and India at the White House on Friday. The four key democracies are teaming up to counter China, which is also a major trading partner.
-
President Biden will meet on Friday with the leaders of Japan, Australia and India. Their agenda includes the pandemic and climate change. But analysts say the Quad group is mainly about China.
-
Last winter, Indian farmers staged some of the biggest street protests in history against government moves to deregulate agriculture. Nine months on, many farmers worry their cause has been forgotten.
-
In India, Hindu nationalists have passed laws making it harder for interfaith couples to marry. The laws have increased a stigma and emboldened extremists to interrupt weddings.
-
In India, new laws forbid brides or grooms from converting to their spouse's religion. The idea is to halt forced conversions. But they've led to attacks on interfaith couples.
-
The Taliban's ideology has distant links to India. Scholars say Afghanistan's new leaders might listen to clerics in the birthplace of Deobandi Islam, though the clerics deny ties with the Taliban.
-
For India, the power shift in Kabul may mean a loss of security, as well as a loss of economic power and influence in a region increasingly dominated by another neighbor that it's uneasy about: China.
-
Afghanistan's neighbors are bracing for an influx of Afghan refugees, and adjusting to a new diplomatic reality now that the Taliban are back in charge.
