Martin Amis, the novelist, is earning nearly £3,000 an hour working as a university professor, it has emerged.
The writer, 58, earns £80,000 for working 28 hours a year as professor of creative writing at Manchester University.
Amis, whose novel, Money, was about the effects of excess and greed, took up the post in September as part of a £10 million drive by the university to appoint "iconic" figures to help it become one of the world's top educational establishments by 2015.
Manchester University recently cut 600 posts, many of them teaching staff, to help reduce a £30 million deficit.
His duties consist of 12 postgraduate seminars of 90 minutes each, plus four two-hour public lectures and a two-hour teaching event at a summer school.
Amis, the son of the late Sir Kingsley Amis, was once feted as a literary icon for novels such as London Fields.
He inspired a mixture of awe and envy in the literary world in 1994 when he switched agents.
Dissatisfied with offers that he was getting for his novel, The Information, he switched agents to Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie, regarded as the most ruthless in the business, in an attempt to secure a £500,000 deal.
On Friday night the Wylie Agency declined to comment on Amis's university salary.
The university insisted on Friday that it was getting good value for money because Amis's appointment had seen applications to the Centre for New Writing rise from 100 last year to 150 next year.
Most visiting lecturers at Manchester are said to earn between £20 and £50 an hour. Nationally, the average academic earned £39,000 in 2005/6.
Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, added: "With class sizes in universities bigger than in schools and with education staff racking up more overtime than any other group, one might question the wisdom of a university using such a large amount of its budget to fund one member of staff."
Dave Jones, the senior organiser of Unite, which represents technical staff at the university, said: "We understand why people like Martin Amis are being sought by the university.
"But those staff who are left after the redundancies and early retirements need to know there will also be investment into their careers as well."
Amis, who earned derision in some quarters when he spent a reported £20,000 on reconstructive dental surgery in the 1980s, has said he took up the post because he thought spending time with young people would provide him with material for his novels.
He returned to Britain in 2006 critical of Islamic fundamentalism and saying that his politics had swung to the Right after spending more than two years living in Uruguay with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, and their children.
His appointment galvanised the campus when he clashed with one of his new colleagues, Terry Eagleton, a Marxist academic and professor of cultural theory.
After Amis wrote that it was normal to feel retaliatory urges against Muslims after the 9/11 terror attacks, Prof Eagleton compared Amis to "a British National party thug" and called his father "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals", a claim robustly rejected by his family.
The university has refused to confirm Amis's salary and said the contracted 28 hours took no account of time that he would spend on research and writing.
It added: "The University of Manchester has an ambitious strategy to becoming one of the top 25 research-led universities in the world and the presence of iconic scholars like Martin Amis is essential."
