WATERVILLE -- Paul Salopek, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, credits his working-class background and upbringing in rural Mexico for his ability to tell the stories of ordinary people struggling to survive wars, poverty and exploitation in the developing world.

"Telling those stories is compelling to me because I feel part of them. They are people I grew up with and their emotional lives are every bit as complicated as our own," he said in an interview.

Salopek, 47, has reported from more than 50 countries and from more than 20 conflict zones. In 2006, he was imprisoned for five weeks in war-torn Darfur where he endured beatings and brutal jail conditions.

He went on a hunger strike and declined offers of freedom until he knew his Chadian driver and Sudanese translator would also be freed.

Salopek will receive the 2009 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism and an honorary doctor of laws degree from Colby College at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 18 in Colby's Lorimer Chapel.

Earlier in the day, at 4 p.m., he will join a panel of journalists in a discussion on "Covering the World with a Shrinking Newsroom."

As a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Salopek won the Pulitzer Prize twice for individual work, including in 2001 for reporting while traveling by dugout canoe from the civil war in Congo. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine and, this fall, is teaching a seminar at Princeton University as a McGraw Writing Fellow on reporting from the developing world. He also is writing a book about Mexico.

The Lovejoy Award has been given annually since 1952 to honor courageous journalism. It is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Colby's valedictorian in 1826 and a passionate abolitionist publisher who was killed in Alton, Ill., in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob. He is considered America's first martyr to freedom of the press.

In the interview, Salopek described growing up in California and rural Mexico. He dropped out of high school, earned a general educational development certificate and put himself through college by working as a fisherman and a farmhand. He stumbled into journalism by taking a job as a police reporter at a small newspaper in New Mexico.

Salopek said he never took a journalism course; everything he knows about writing he learned from newspaper reporters and editors he met along the way and from his love of reading.

His commitment to tell the stories of people's lives means he spends weeks living and laboring alongside those he chronicles. He has traveled by horseback across mountain ranges in New Guinea and Afghanistan; worked as a night clerk at a Midwest gas station; and rode 1,300 miles through rural Mexico by mule. "My job is to be a camera and record as accurately as possible what I see and hear," he said.

While he has told stories of refugees, war victims, rebel soldiers and pirates from Somalia, the Balkans, and Ethiopia, he said his biggest challenge was being captured in western Sudan while reporting on genocide in Darfur for National Geographic.

On Aug. 6, 2006, Salopek, his driver and translator were captured by a pro-government militia and imprisoned on false charges of espionage. They faced up to 22 years in prison, he said.

Pressure from journalism colleagues and negotiations by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson eventually won their release.

Salopek said foreign correspondents, especially those who dip into conflict, are prepared for confrontations.

"You talk to refugees, you talk to political detainees -- people who have had a much worse experience than you," he said.

"I had spent years in that world. I had been detained for days before and deported from countries. Being imprisoned did not come as an utter shock because the possibility was always there," he said.

But what happened in the Sudan was the most frightening.

Salopek said there were times he was scared for his life. At first, he was held in solitary confinement. Eventually, the three men were kept together and they formed a team, using their different strengths to get through the ordeal.

"It would have been very different if we had to undergo it alone," he said.

He first learned of the Lovejoy honor when he checked his e-mail from a cyber café in a small town in South Africa.

"It is wonderful to have my work recognized," he said. "But I am just another reporter. I am not a crusading columnist. I go out to collect stories and if I can move one individual, I consider that a success."

"I see this award more as recognition of my sources. I am accepting it for the people I write about, the people whose stories don't get told."

Betty Jespersen -- 778-6991

bjespersen@centralmaine.com