Nick Spicer

Nick Spicer serves on NPR’s International Desk as Europe Editor, working with a team of correspondents in Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin, Paris, Rome and London.

He was a student of English Literature at Queen’s University in Canada when, in 1988, he met Andrei Sakharov, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and inventor of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, for an article in the student newspaper — and discovered a passion for international news and questions of war and peace.

After completing a degree in European Union studies at Sciences Po in Paris in 1995, Spicer worked for CBC Radio and then joined NPR in September 2001. He covered France’s opposition to the war in Iraq and then the war itself across that country as part of the NPR team awarded a duPont-Columbia award for its work on the conflict.

A citizen of both France and Canada, Spicer served as a correspondent for CBC-Radio Canada in Moscow. He started there in 2004 by covering the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, interviewing the poisoned but later victorious presidential candidate, Viktor Yuschenko. Later, as the Kremlin cracked down on Russia’s fledgling democratic opposition, his team filmed the only video of the arrest of chess grandmaster and leader of the Other Russia party, Garry Kasparov.

Spicer also chronicled in TV reports the deadly challenges of deploying of Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the insurgency in Chechnya, and how Russia used hydrocarbons as a political weapon in Europe — way up in the frozen gas fields near Novy Urengoy, beyond the Arctic Circle.

Spicer moved to Washington, D.C., for Al Jazeera English to follow the unlikely candidacy of the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, and focused — after the election of the 44th president — on issues of racial justice, but also challenges for American foreign policy: the “surge” in Afghanistan, the invasion of Georgia, and the Arab Spring.

In 2011 Spicer moved to Berlin, where he covered the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis, the Dignity Revolution in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, the rise of the European far right, as well as terror attacks across the political spectrum — including the 2015 Charlie Hebdo by radical Islamists. He took a year off in 2015 to improve his German — he is bilingual in English and French and speaks workaday Russian.

He also started writing The Ghost Who Couldn’t Die, a nuclear and psychological thriller set in Ukraine during the 2014 Dignity Revolution, featuring a troubled U.S. Marine, a ghost, an aging nuclear scientist on the run, a legendary female spy from the former East Germany, and a sprinkling of Ukrainian hip hop.

Just before joining NPR in February 2024, Spicer was a news presenter at Deutsche Welle, a Germany and Europe correspondent for France 24, and a part-time university lecturer on newsroom management, on-air performance and storytelling in the field.

As a journalist, Spicer feels like an economy-class version of Tennyson’s Ulysses, who said: “I am a part of all I have met”: he is grateful to have been able been able to share encounters with people from all walks of life in all kinds of places: some “big names” from the pages of history, but more memorably, perhaps, the everyday folks whose hopes and dreams make the future. There is more quiet courage out there than many imagine.

He’s eager to use his past experiences to help NPR’s reporters discover and share new stories about Europe today. [Copyright 2025 NPR]