Martin Amis is to become a teacher for the first time, taking up a position at Manchester University as Professor of Creative Writing.

The author said he hoped that his academic role would bring about inspiration for a new book. He promised to be a generous tutor, despite his reputation as an unforgiving critic.

He said: “I may be acerbic in how I write but I’m not in how I live. And I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to people in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I’ll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them.”

The university is expected to announce its academic coup this morning.

Amis returned to Britain in September after living in Uru-guay for 2½ years. He told The Guardianthat it was time to try something different, and he hoped that a new novel would evolve from the experience.

Asked what he hoped to get out of the teaching, he said: “A novel perhaps. I suppose I can own up to this, I’m 57 and there comes a point when, my father [the late Sir Kingsley Amis] puts it very well, he said: ‘There comes a point where you think, it’s not like that any more.’

“A social change in the collective consciousness has happened and you feel you are not seeing it.”

He said that his new students and his time on campus might provide a new window of opportunity. “I have a lot of children, but children only give you a very partial view of what is going on. They are quite secretive and edit what they tell you.

“I want to get out there and take my own reading of what young people are like now. I have a lot of curiosity about that and maybe, when these strange experiences are out of the way, when it’s over, it might form itself into a novel.”

Amis said that he would handle his new role carefully.

“One of the things I’ve learnt about fiction — you really do lay yourself open in a way that no other so-called creative artist does. In most other art you are just exhibiting a particular talent, even poetry up to a point, but by writing fiction you expose not only your talent but your whole being, your social, sexual and psychological being, and you’re never more vulnerable than when you do that, and I’m well aware of that fact.”

Amis said that he did not see the decision to move into the world of academia as following in his father’s footsteps. Sir Kingsley taught between 1949 and 1961. “I seldom compare my life to my father’s,” he said. “We had this one thing in common, and we got on very well, but that’s the end of it.”

Amis said he was “delighted on the whole” to be back in Britain but said he believed there had been a cultural shift during his time away, claiming that he sensed unease beneath the UK’s multicultural society.

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