Moore, best known as a short-story writer, won the fiction prize for her novel, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home.

Committee chair David Varno described the book as a heartbreaking and hilarious ghost story about a man who considers what it means to be human in a world infected by, as Moore puts it, 'voluntary insanity.'

Blume was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

The committee cited the way her novels including Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret have "inspired generations of young readers by tackling the emotional turbulence of girlhood and adolescence with authenticity, candour and courage."

It also praised her role as "a relentless opponent of censorship and an iconic champion of literary freedom."

The American Library Association was given the Toni Morrison Achievement Award, established to honour institutions for their contributions to book culture. The committee said the group had a "longstanding commitment to equity, including its 20th century campaigns against library segregation and for LGBT+ literature, and its perennial stance as a bulwark against those regressive and illiberal supporters of book bans."

Blume, who accepted her award remotely from a bookstore she runs in Key West, Florida, thanked the ALA for "their tireless work in protecting our intellectual freedoms."

Other winners included poet Safiya Sinclair, who took the autobiography prize for her acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon, about her Jamaican childhood and strict Rastafarian upbringing.

Jonny Steinberg won the biography award for his Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, about Nelson and Winnie Mandela.

Kim Hyesoon of South Korea won for poetry for her Phantom Pain Wings.

For translation, an award that honours both translator and book, the winner was Maureen Freely for her translation from the Turkish of the late Tezer Ozlu's Cold Nights of Childhood.

The book critics circle, founded in 1974, consists of hundreds of reviewers and editors from around the country.

Australian Associated Press