“Hate is not only a political strategy, it is a failure of imagination, a lack of empathy. We can’t legislate for imagination, we can only do what people have always done: tell new stories, build better worlds in the theatre of the mind.” — Dan Cass I am on the shortlist for  the 2018 Deborah Cass award. Deborah was an academic at the London School of Economics who decided to focus on creative writing after a cancer diagnosis. She had two short stories published before she passed away in 2013 at the age of 53. Her family and friends set up the Deborah Cass Prize for early career writers from a…