The Márai program to be financed from a HUF 1 bn budget will start in January 2011, the target of which is to support the publication, distribution and presence in libraries of literary and educational works – announced Géza Szőcs, under-secretary responsible for culture and Marcell Jankovics, president of the commission of the National Cultural Fund on Thursday.

The Márai-program is focused on works of art (meaning that nothing but assets representing both national and universal treasures of culture count much) and it states that the main target group is constituted by readers who, no matter where they live in the world, wish to read Hungarian literature, Hungarian factual and technical literature or the translation of such in foreign languages.

As a consequence, the Márai-program wishes to give direct and indirect help to all the market and state operators who play a role in the creation, publication of the works and their distribution to the target group, including authors, publishing houses and libraries.

The Márai-program pays attention to and spends money and energy not only on furnishing libraries with as many books as possible but also on providing advanced support to the creators i.e. the authors of the works. Therefore, through appropriate background programs a receptive medium suitable for arousing the interest in books has been established, which guarantees the presence of the works concerned not only potentially but also actually in the everyday life our society.

Furthermore, the Márai-program pays attention to make the country’s presence on the international market and circulation of cultural assets as marked as possible. The partial program called Publishing Hungary is to achieve that target as it is aimed at publishing Hungarian works abroad and expanding the necessary network of translators of literary works.