Clifford Donald Simak, a newspaperman and an award-winning writer of science fiction, died Monday at Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis. He was 83 years old.

Mr. Simak wrote more than two dozen novels, several nonfiction science books and hundreds of short stories during a 37-year career as reporter, news editor and science editor for the Minneapolis Star and The Minneapolis Tribune.

Among his better-known titles are City, published in 1952; Way Station (1963); The Visitors (1979), and Skirmish: the Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, comprising stories he published from 1944 to 1975. He received three Hugo Awards, regarded as the Oscar of science-fiction writing, and three Science Fiction Association of America Nebula Awards, including the Grand National in recognition of his entire collection of work. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1973.

Mr. Simak was born on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin for a short time. He taught school for several years before taking the first of several newspaper jobs in 1929.

He began his career with the Star and the Tribune in 1939. Many science-fiction writers wrote of invincible supermen, but Mr. Simak wrote about common people who didn't always win. "I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space," he said once. "I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme - if we have a purpose. "In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one."

Mr. Simak's wife of 56 years, Agnes, died in 1985. He is survived by a daughter, a son, and a brother.