SCIENTIST Stephen Hawking will bring his illuminating theories to the Charleston Festival in May.

The British theoretical cosmologist is the recipient of the third Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize and will deliver the Keynes lecture on Monday, May 22.

The prize honours Mr Hawking’s “outstanding contribution to society”.

Over the course of a 50-year career, Mr Hawking’s work has focused on black holes, the origins of the universe and the environmental dangers facing the human race.

His book A Brief History Of Time was a worldwide bestseller and he is currently chairman of cosmology at Cambridge University.

Dame Liz Forgan, chairwoman of the prize’s advisory panel, said Mr Hawking was an “outstanding thinker” in the line of economist Maynard Keynes, who the award was named after.

She said: “Stephen Hawking is one of the great minds of our age; a teacher, an innovator and an explorer of the biggest questions facing humankind.

“In the defiant courage with which he lives his life he is also an inspiration for millions who may never read his books.”

Mr Hawking said he was “delighted to be joining the Charleston Festival this year”.

“This is a great honour for me and acknowledges one of one of our most celebrated economists.”

Mr Hawking will receive a sum of £8,000 with the suggestion that he uses it to commission a work of art in any form.

Maynard Keynes was a patron of arts and founder of the Arts Council.

Previous prize winners are the Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, one of the world’s foremost thinkers in the field of poverty, social choice and welfare economics, and the British computer scientist and inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Other notable speakers at this year’s event are politicians Nick Clegg, Harriet Harman and Caroline Lucas, performer Barry Humphries, actor Vanessa Redgrave and author Michael Rosen.

Tickets are on general sale from February 20.

Day tickets start at £65, with an all-events ticket for the 11-day festival costing £550.

lThe full festival programme can be viewed online at www.charleston.org.uk/festival.