Philip Pullman has revealed he was delighted to discover his novel Northern Lights was one of the most "challenged" titles of the year in America, with numerous calls made to have it removed from libraries.

Pullman's children's novel, which is sold as The Golden Compass in the US, was the fourth most challenged book in 2007, according to the American Library Association, which received 420 formally submitted complaints to libraries or schools over "inappropriate content and subject matter" last year.

Writing for guardian.co.uk this morning, Pullman said his immediate response on hearing the latest figures from the ALA was "glee". "Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn't get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could," Pullman said, pointing to previous objections to the film of The Golden Compass, which he said resulted in soaring book sales.

The Vatican on Wednesday condemned the film "The Golden Compass," which some have called anti-Christian, saying it promotes a cold and hopeless world without God. In a long editorial, the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, also slammed Philip Pullman, the bestselling author of the book on which the family fantasy movie is based.

It was the Vatican's most stinging broadside against an author and a film since it roundly condemned "The Da Vinci Code" in 2005 and 2006. "In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events," the editorial said.

The film, which premiered earlier this month in the United States and stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is an adaptation of Pullman's acclaimed novel "Northern Lights." The Vatican newspaper said "honest" viewers would find it "devoid of any particular emotion apart from a great chill."

Philip Pullman, who was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, is already an honorary fellow of the university. The writer will take seminars for Bangor students and host discussions on literature and narrative structures. He said he was "delighted" to accept the role because he associated north Wales with his first real writing.

"It's not too much to say that my awakening to the pleasures and responsibilities of literature took place in Miss Enid Jones' English class at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech," he said. Speaking to BBC Wales last year, Pullman said he was "intoxicated" by the landscape of the region as he was growing up.

"I wanted to be a painter when I was a teenager and I spent a lot of time drawing and learning to look at things." Pullman's appointment in the arts and humanities department follows careers as a teacher and a teacher trainer. He has written more than 30 books altogether with his most famous works being the best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. The last book in the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass was the first children's novel to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2002.