The four-day book festival features publishers from 25 countries, hundreds of authors, and more than 40,000 books.
In his opening speech, Hiller remarked that reading is itself a form of art, which one must master with care. "What we read is a measure of ourselves," he said, adding that real literature presents us with a challenge, an "intellectual ascent".
Hiller said he was happy to be able to say that reading in Hungary has for centuries, and to the present day, been seen as something of great value. He noted that the country's publishing industry has presented a "real success story" over the past decade. Each year, more than 12,000 new books are published in Hungary. Of these, 15pc are literature, well over the European average. Hungary's publishers and writers are also regular participants at many of the most important international book festivals.
Hiller presented the festival's first non-European guest of honour, Canada, and said the country's literature would be a "real curiosity" for Hungarian readers.
Robert Hage, Canada's ambassador to Hungary, acknowledged the honour of showing Canada's books and culture at such an important event. He said Canada's publishing industry had been transformed over the past thirty years, in part due to increased state subsidies. The expansion of the publishing industry as well as literature's growing share of the market is one of Canada's biggest success stories, he said, noting that more than half of Canadians now read books every day.
Hage said the Canadian Embassy would present several hundred books at its stand at the festival. It will also show an exhibition of photographs by the Canadian photographer V. Tony Hauser, called New Lives and Canada, which shows recent portraits of fifty prominent Hungarians who settled in Canada after the 1956 Revolution. The portraits are accompanied by biographies demonstrating how these refugees contributed to Canada's cultural, economic and social development.
Hiller used the occasion to present Peter Weidhaas, the former director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, with the Republic of Hungary's Order of Merit. It was with Weidhaas's assistance that the Budapest International Book Festival was restarted in 1994.
The festival's other guest of honour, Umberto Eco - who has made an indelible mark on modern thinking with his works on semiotics as well as his novels, which include the sensation The Name of the Rose - was presented with the Budapest Prize by the capital's mayor Gábor Demszky.
Demszky compared Eco's work Opera Aperta, in which he argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning and should be understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields, to the idea of the open society in the area of politics. While Eco's idea of the open work has become the goal of much of modern literature, openness has also served as the foundation for today's democratic, Western and globalised society, he said. Through his brilliant writings, Eco has become the secular prophet for this open world, he added.
In a speech at the presentation of the award, the Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy lauded Eco as a "true intellectual and a true writer." Esterházy acknowledged his great admiration for Eco and, on a lighter note, admitted that he had named his dog Umberto.
Esterházy said that Eco is a reader, "a great reader, a great European reader, one of the greatest." This can be seen in all of Eco's works, and in an organic manner - even in his novels - which is exceptionally rare, he said.
Accepting the award, the 75-year-old Eco said writing is not an occupation. When a writer produces one book every year, that is slavery, he said, adding that he himself writes only when he wants to, which ensures great freedom.
Eco conceded that he had wanted to become a writer from the time he was ten years old, but his first attempts yielded no results for another four decades.
Speaking about the role of the writer, Eco called society's expectation that the writer should answer and react to current problems a "European sickness". "In America, nobody goes to Philip Roth to ask what he thinks about this or that; he can't give an answer with respect to the present," he said. Writers and intellectuals should speak about the future, or about what other are not saying, he added.
Introducing his newest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which has just been published in Hungarian, Eco revealed that Queen Loana is a magic comic book hero from his childhood. He said that every writer includes in their work something of their life, even when creating the most antipathetic character.
Eco added that if he ever has a dog, he will name it Péter Esterházy.
