Alasdair Roberts' 2024 book "The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century" is one of five finalists for the Writers' Trust 2025 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize is awarded "for an exceptional book of literary nonfiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers."
"The Adaptable Country" looks at how Canada is losing ground in its capacity to anticipate and manage the shifting terrain of geopolitics, demographics, climate change, and technology. The publisher, McGill-Queen’s University Press, says the book “outlines practical reforms to improve adaptability, reminding us of the bigger picture: in a turbulent world, authoritarian rule is a tempting path to security. Canada’s challenge is to show how political systems built to respect diversity can also respond deftly to existential threats.”