Damon Runyon Award
The Damon Runyon Award has been presented annually by the historic Denver Press Club each spring since 1994.
The award is named after Damon Runyon, a legendary journalist who grew up in Colorado, worked at The Denver Post and Pueblo Chieftain, and became a member of the Press Club in 1907.
Runyon later went on to fame and glory in New York City as a columnist for Hearst newspapers. He is best-known for a collection of stories called “Guys and Dolls,” which later turned into a Broadway musical and a movie.
The Runyon Award banquet is the major fundraiser of the historic club, which is the oldest in the nation. Proceeds go toward the club’s historic preservation and five scholarships for $1500 and one — the John C. Ensslin Memorial Scholarship — for $3,000. The scholarships are reserved for college journalists from universities in Colorado.
This year’s Damon Runyon Award ceremony will be April 14, 2023. Find more details here.
Damon Runyon Award Honorees

Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez, an award-winning Los Angeles Times columnist whose story of a mentally ill homeless musician inspired the movie “The Soloist,” is the 29th winner of the Denver Press Club’s Damon Runyon Award.
Lopez will be honored at the club’s Damon Runyon dinner on April 16 at the Hilton Garden Inn, 1400 Welton St., in Denver. Tickets are on sale.
Lopez is a California native who has been a Times columnist since 2001, focusing on important community and societal issues – elder care, income inequality, housing and homelessness. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary – in 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020. In 2020, the Pulitzer Board lauded his “purposeful columns about rising homelessness in Los Angeles, which amplified calls for government action to deal with a long- visible public crisis.”
His columns cut deep – like one June 1, 2019, that began with a vivid description of current realities underscored with disbelief that they were unfolding in modern-day Los Angeles:
The good news is that two trash-strewn downtown Los Angeles streets I wrote about last week were cleaned up by city work crews and have been kept that way, as of this writing. The bad news is that I didn’t have to travel far to find more streets just as badly fouled by filthy mounds of junk and stinking, rotting food.
Then there was the news that the LAPD station on skid row was cited by the state for a rodent infestation and other unsanitary conditions, and that one employee there was infected with the strain of bacteria that causes typhoid fever.
What century is this?
“The Doctor Is In,” Lopez’s story about how easy it was to legally obtain medical marijuana in Southern California, was among a series of reports on television station KCET’s SoCal Connected show that was honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in 2011. The duPont is among the most prestigious honors in broadcast journalism.
In addition, Lopez is also the author of three novels and two collections of his columns. His book, “The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music,” was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times best-seller and winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Non-Fiction. The book was based on Lopez’s friendship with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musician living on Skid Row. Ayers had been a promising violinist but had left the Juilliard School as he struggled with mental illness. Lopez’s columns about Ayers led readers to send instruments to Lopez for Ayers. That friendship also eventually helped Ayers get help for his schizophrenia and get off the streets.
The book was inspired the DreamWorks movie “The Soloist,” starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez.
The Runyon is the Denver Press Club’s highest honor, and Lopez joins a list of previous winners that reads like an honor roll of American journalism: Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, Molly Ivins, Herb Caen, Pete Hamill, Ted Turner, Maureen Dowd, Tom Brokaw, David Halberstam, Ed Bradley, Carl Hiaasen, Seymour Hersh, George Will, Bob Costas, Tim Russert, Rick Reilly, P.J. O’Rourke, Anna Quindlen, Frank Deford, Mike Lupica, Katie Couric, Norm Clarke, Jill Abramson, David Simon, Marty Baron, Bob Woodward, Judy Woodruff and – in 2022 – Eugene Robinson.

Eugene Robinson
2022
Associate Editor and Columnist for The Washington Post
and Commentator for MSNBC

Judy Woodruff
2020
Managing Editor and Anchor for PBS NewsHour

Bob Woodward
2019
Reporter and Editor at The Washington Post

Marty Baron
2018
Executive Editor of the Washington Post

David Simon
2017
Creator of HBO's The Wire.

Jill Abramson
2016
Former editor of The New York Times

Norm Clarke
2015
Longtime Rocky Mountain News and Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist

Katie Couric
2014
Former CBS News Anchor

Mike Lupica
2013
New York Daily News Columnist

Frank Deford
2012
Sportswriter / NPR Sports Commentator

Anna Quindlen
2011
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist

P.J. O'Rourke
2010
Journalist and political satirist

Rick Reilly
2009
Sportswriter

Tim Russert
2008
Former Meet the Press anchor on NBC.

Bob Costas
2007
NBC Sports and Olympics anchor

George Will
2006
Columnist for The Washington Post

Seymour Hersh
2005
Journalist for The New Yorker and the London Review of Books

Carl Hiaasen
2004
Columnist for the Miami Herald and Tribune Content Agency.

Ed Bradley
2003
Correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes.

David Halberstam
2002
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and historian

Tom Brokaw
2001
Former NBC Nightly News Anchor

Maureen Dowd
2000
Columnist for The New York Times

Ted Turner
1999
Founder of CNN

Pete Hamill
1998
Former columnist and editor of the New York Daily News and the New York Post

Herb Caen
1996
Humorist and journalist

Molly Ivins
1996
Columnist and author

Mike Royko
1995
Pulitzer Prize winning columnist

Jimmy Breslin
1994
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author