David Rudisha

I was still young when I missed Beijing. I was favourite to win a medal but I knew I had time. My coach advised me to stay at school and finish my exams. Even if I had gone and won the Olympics, I might not have handled the pressure. So I moved on.

Going to the Olympics as a Maasai I want to make them proud because, after the warm welcome they gave me when I went back and being their leader, I want to also be the warrior in the Olympics. That will be something good because that will be the first Olympic gold medal for the Maasai.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

It is wonderful to contemplate how the planetary forces balance each other so perfectly that universal equilibrium is maintained despite the disturbances of the 1,500 millions which inhabit the Earth alone, not to speak of other spheres.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.