Daily News Channel
Quinn Berentson has won $2500 for resurrecting the moa – in his award-winning book, Moa: The life and death of New Zealand’s legendary bird. It is among three winners of the New Zealand Society of Authors’ Best First Book Awards, and was described by chief judge John Campbell as “a really great historical biography, in which almost everyone (including the bird itself) is varying degrees of mad”.
In the 76-year history of the New York Film Critics, only two moviemakers have been honored with life achievement awards: Jean-Luc Godard and Sidney Lumet. The French director is of course the prickly master of movie modernism, but Lumet was something Gotham critics could appreciate: the primary apostle of streetwise cinema, the torch-bearer of ground-glass realism and, for a half-century, the ultimate chronicler of New York City in all its agita and chutzpah.