Globe writer wins award for his coverage of Europe

Boston Globe writer Colin Nickerson has won a major foreign reporting award for his coverage of Europe.

Nickerson, an international correspondent for nearly a quarter of a century, received the Peter R. Weitz Prize for excellence and originality in US reporting on Europe, mainly Germany, between January and November 2006.

The German Marshall Fund of the United States, which will present the award this fall, announced the 2007 recipients yesterday.

Nickerson is now a science writer for the paper. Most recently, he served as European bureau chief in Berlin, writing stories on, among other subjects, German war babies in search of their GI fathers in the United States and the cultural reverberations of Turkish guest workers' immigration to Germany in the 1960s.

"I just think that it's really nice recognition for the Globe's former foreign news operation," Nickerson said yesterday, referring to the newspaper's decision this year to close its international bureaus as a cost-saving measure.

Nickerson, 57, joined the paper in 1981 as a reporter in its Concord, N.H., bureau. During his 26-year career at the Globe, he covered stories in more than 80 countries and four continents.

After the Berlin bureau was closed, Nickerson took an assignment as a science writer.

He said that as a foreign correspondent, he tried to bring an understanding of life abroad to Americans.

"My main focus was taking what is foreign, what is Europe, who are its people, and trying to explain them to an American audience," he said.

A Cambridge native, Nickerson graduated from Marlboro College in Vermont in 1974, then worked at the Orleans County Chronicle of Vermont and the Rutland Herald in Vermont before coming to the Globe.

Nickerson will receive a prize of $10,000 as part of the award. The fund also honored Wall Street Journal reporter Marcus Walker with its junior prize for journalists under the age of 35 for his reporting on employment and social welfare issues in Europe.

The German Marshall Fund of the United States is a public policy group that strives to promote cooperation between the United States and Europe.