On 17 May, at 3pm,  the second Hay Festival Budapest opens in the Central European University. Karla Wursterová, Executive Director of the International Visegrad Fund in Bratislava, Slovakia, discusses with Péter Balázs, Director of the CEU Center of EU Enlargement Studies and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary and Michal Černý, Director of the Czech Center in Budapest, how co-operation among Central European states (the Visegrad Group and the Central European Initiative) influences the formation of European foreign policy.

At 4:40 PM Michael E. Cox, director of London School of Economics and Adam Austerfield, professor of International Relations talk about what global political and economic changes we can expect from the rise of China, India, Latin America and other developing markets around the world, and what this means for Central and Eastern Europe. All programmes run with simultaneous interpretation from English into Hungarian.

At 5:45 PM Marcus du Sautoy talks to academician and Wolf Prize winner mathematician László Lovász about how symmetry is a fundamental concept both in the arts and the sciences: from the walls of the Alhambra to the Higgs Boson, from the music of Bach to deadly viruses. Sautoy tells the story, based on his book Finding Moonshine, of how mathematicians have produced a language to be able to explore, tame and classify this slippery concept. Sautoy’s The Music of the Primes will be the first volume in Hungarian language, to be published by Park Kiadó this autumn under the title A prímszámok zenéje.

From 7 PM writer and literature historian Zsófia Bán talks to Nicole Krauss, one of the most significant contemporary American authors about her latest novel Great House. Her previous works, The History of Love and Man Walks into a Room, bestsellers in both English and Hungarian, have been specially reprinted for her visit to Budapest.

From 8 PM Classicus Ensemble, a group of talented young Hungarian musicians give a free concert at the Central European University. They play selections from J.S Bach, Three Part Inventions, and from Kurtág, Signs, Games and Messages. At 9:30 PM the Akvárium Klub hosts Dark Dark Dark, an American folk band from Minneapolis. Formed in 2006, they have toured extensively in the United States and Europe and are known for their blend of New Orleans jazz, Americana, Eastern European folk and pop sensibilities.

The goal of the Hay Festival founded 25 years ago in Hay-on-Wye is to make people think together about the world both as it is and as it might be. Among the next programmes of the festival we will meet among others architect Odile Decq, the American investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, and the British Peter Florence, founder and director of Hay Festival who talks to Péter Esterházy.

Tickets for all discussions (both at PIM and CEU) can be purchased in advance at the ticket office of PIM (Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum), the Libri bookshops, online at www.PORT.hu, or at the venues on the day of the programme.

For more information about the complete programme of the 2013 Hay Festival Budapest please, visit hayfestival.org/budapest and hungarofest.hu.