It is not always true that a novelist, poet or playwright are the only ones that get a Nobel Prize.
Sometimes a journalist gets one as well, such as Svetlana Alexievich, and sometimes a philosopher, such as Henri Bergson. Indeed, in theory, any type of writing may be awarded the Prize, though the Academy usually goes for the similar types.
Recently Richard Dawkins has asked why has scientists been left out of the circle, when a lot of them write with elegance and style (I think of Steven Pinker's clear prose). Presumably this is the case because most of the Nobel Prizes goes to scientists for their clearly defined and measurable achievements, why give any more to them?
I would like to ask a similar question but about historians, why have there been none for the Nobel Prize for Literature in it's own long history?
The reason I ask is that I have recently been reading a lot of history. It strikes me that the kind of writing necessary for requires huge efforts in skill, in assimilation, in precision that is worthy of the highest literature award for it all.
When you think that a sentence, for the historian, might have to comprise several years of lived life it asks a lot of that writer to write it accurately, to give a just presentation of that time and to do so vividly requires serious talents. For it is a lot harder to re-create a half-submerged world than to invent one. There is a lot riding on you to it sensibly, as politics in this age could be changed.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume was regarded more as a historian in his own time, and one would think that his studies of men and women of the past informed his own thought experiments, which possibly proves the value of studying history.
Reading two books on the histories of the world (History of the World by J.M. Roberts, and An Unfinished History of the World by Hugh Thomas) I am bowled over as to how they must have researched and collected all the information that they needed to write such books. And similarly with Yuval Noah Harari's Saipens it shows that history, and the way we look at them, changes. History is not so fixed in the past as it can be constantly re-interpenetrated.
For all that the Academy has not seen this value and continues to award the Prize to creators of new worlds.
So this year I will be looking around and taking suggestions for a possible living historian that may well be a contender to champion for the Nobel Prize. If anything I have leaned from history is that it is always in a process of change.
