Canadian author discusses US under Donald Trump and says setting of dystopian novel has ‘become much closer’

Margaret Atwood has said the plot of her book The Handmaid’s Tale, which tells a story of an authoritarian regime under which women are forced to reproduce, has become “more and more plausible” in recent years.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was “bonkers” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.

Hardish Virk uses photography, film, music and his family’s memorabilia to tell a wider story of migration and community resilience

As you enter the living room at the Stories That Made Us exhibition, a stereo plays the Hindi anthem Yeh Dosti Hum Nahi Todenge. It is a ballad celebrating friendship and love from the epic film Sholay. Beside the stereo sits a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a red glass decanter. On the table are copies of the Punjabi newspaper Des Pardes, which translates as “home and abroad”.

The scene, which depicts the childhood home of the Coventry-born curator and artist Hardish Virk, is one of several spaces in an immersive exhibition at the city’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. It traces four decades of the experiences of south Asians as they arrived and adapted to the social, political and cultural changes in modern Britain.