A MAJOR book publisher has come under fire after reportedly paying $US250,000 ($345,000) to a right-wing internet troll who was banned from Twitter for harassing a black actor.

Milo Yiannopoulos, who signed the deal with Simon & Schuster, has courted controversy for labelling transgender people “mentally ill”, calling feminism “a cancer” and claiming that the Black Lives Matter movement is a “hate group”.

Yiannopoulos was kicked off Twitter in July after his followers harassed the Saturday Night Live comedian and actor Leslie Jones with racist abuse. Jones quit Twitter as a result of the attacks.

Comedian Sarah Silverman led the chorus of complaint against the book deal for Yiannopoulos, who is a tech editor at the alt-right news site Breitbart.

The guy has freedom of speech but to fund him & give him a platform tells me a LOT about @simonschuster YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS https://t.co/CNDUDOHzke — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) December 29, 2016

If you approved a $250K book deal for the troll promoting racist, sexist views so extreme he got thrown off this platform - we need to talk. — Carolyn Kellogg (@paperhaus) December 29, 2016

“The guy has freedom of speech but to fund him & give him a platform tells me a LOT about @simonschuster YUCK AND BOO AND GROSS,” she tweeted.

Carolyn Kellog, the book editor at the Los Angeles Times, echoed Silverman’s views, tweeting: “If you approved a $250K book deal for the troll promoting racist, sexist views so extreme he got thrown off this platform — we need to talk.”

The Chicago Review of Books went even further, vowing not to cover any new Simon & Schuster titles in 2017.

Yiannopoulos, meanwhile, taunted his critics on Facebook claiming that “every line of attack the forces of political correctness try on me fails pathetically.”

He wrote: “I’m more powerful, more influential, and more fabulous than ever before and this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream.”

He also gloated that the book, which is titled Dangerous and will focus on the rise of the “populist, nationalist Trump phenomenon” had already reached number 5 on the Amazon Bestseller list thanks to pre-orders.

Yiannopoulos, who is openly gay and calls himself the “dangerous f**got”, signed the deal with Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint Threshold, which has printed books by other conservative figures such as Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh.