Press club honors two Monitor correspondents

The Overseas Press Club has honored two foreign correspondents of The Christian Science Monitor for outstanding coverage during 1981.

David K. Willis, the Monitor's London Bureau chief, won the Bob Considine Award for the best daily newspaper or wire service interpretation of foreign affairs.

Elizabeth Pond, who heads the Monitor's Bonn Bureau, was selected to receive a Citation for Excellence (honorable mention) in the same category.

Mr. Willis's award was based on two entries: ''On the Trail of the A-Bomb Makers,'' and ''Soviet Memorandum.'' His ''Soviet Memorandum'' was a valedictory to his 4 1/2 years spent as a correspondent in Moscow. Mr. Willis left his Moscow assignment in January 1981 to assume his current post in London.

He researched his second entry, ''On the Trail of the A-Bomb Makers,'' while in London, as well as in 11 other cities in seven countries in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and in the United States. As a result of his five-part series, the Monitor was able to amass new evidence to show that atomic devices and the ability to detonate them are spreading to volatile areas of the world.

Miss Pond was honored for her close and informed tracking of the Euromissile controversy. Since 1977 she has been the Monitor's resident correspondent in Bonn, a focal point in the superpower campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Europeans over nuclear weapons. In order to sift propaganda from facts she provided precise details on how the nuclear arsenal of the two superpowers stacks up side by side.

The prizes were presented April 28 at the Annual Awards dinner of the Overseas Press Club at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.