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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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.
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A virtual reality project helps survivors of India's Partition glimpse long-lost birthplaces they fled as children. Fraught relations between India and Pakistan mean they can't visit in person. -
Two Pakistani friends make videos in which those who lived through India's 1947 Partition describe loved ones they lost at the time. With viewers' help, siblings and others are reunited after decades.
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Sri Lanka is paying some foreign debts with tea, rather than cash. But an abrupt ban on chemical fertilizers has hurt crop yields and tea pickers are losing hours and wages as food prices double.
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Fuel shortages have forced many Sri Lankans to ditch their cars and cycle instead. Colombo's mayor unveiled new bike paths. Doctors & environmentalists call it a silver lining, but will it last?
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Sri Lanka offers a cautionary tale for countries struggling with inflation. Anger over fuel lines spilled into the streets and toppled a government. Will nationalism surge, or unity prevail?
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The new government in Sri Lanka has resumed bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund, but rolling blackouts and food and fuel shortages continue.
