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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That's the number of "excess deaths" from January 2020 to June 2021, reflecting the true toll of COVID-19, say researchers in a new study. Why the big disparity? -
Bangladeshi soldiers are enforcing a seven-day lockdown. As the West opens up, poorer countries with low vaccination rates are being hit by wave after wave of COVID-19. -
Hospitals are full. Testing is scant. Illiteracy is high. Most deaths are never registered. COVID-19's wrath in rural India is difficult to measure but public health experts are worried. -
India's health system is collapsing as daily coronavirus cases surge. Will the COVID-19 crisis check the power of the country's most popular leader in decades? -
Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and his entourage at the gathering in the United Kingdom will attend meetings virtually after two members of the delegation reportedly tested positive. -
India's COVID-19 caseload plummeted to record lows in February. Now a startling spike is causing health systems — and possibly law and order — to break down. What went wrong? -
India is the world's largest vaccine producer. But hundreds of its clinics have closed after running out of vaccine — just as the country sees a new spike in infections. -
India has recorded its biggest jump in new coronavirus infections since the pandemic began. Authorities are trying to balance curbs on movement with voting in state elections. -
India is the world's biggest vaccine producer. It's also where the coronavirus is now spreading fastest. Infections are surging across South Asia. -
India's homegrown COVID-19 vaccine has been controversial because the Indian government approved its use before clinical trials showed it works. Now data is finally out.
