entertainment. Tóibín spent his thousands of euro in prize money from his 2006 International Dublin Literary Award on building a house near Blackwater, County Wexford, where he holidayed as child. He filled this house with artworks and expensive furniture and has someone in to keep it clean it for him. He possesses a personal key to the private gated park at Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square, which is shut to ordinary members of the public. In 2019, Tóibín spoke about having survived testicular cancer which spread to multiple organs including a lung, liver and lymph node. Influences Henry James, he is especially fond of The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. Thomas Mann, he is especially fond of Buddenbrooks — which he first read in his late teens — and has also read The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and the novella Death in Venice. Tóibin's non-fiction was influenced by Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. He said decades after the publication of his debut novel (The South), "If you look at it, you see that the sentence structure is more or less taken from Didion", and expressed reservations about its quality. In July 1972, aged 17, he had a summer job as a barman in the Grand Hotel in Tramore, County Waterford, working from six in the evening to two in the morning. He spent his days on the beach, reading The Essential Hemingway, the copy of which he still professes to have, its "pages stained with seawater". The book developed in him a fascination with Spain, led to a wish to visit that country, and gave him "an idea of prose as something glamorous, smart and shaped, and the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences." Eavan Boland introduced him to the poetry of Louise Glück while Boland and Tóibín were at Stanford together in the 2000s. Tóibín stated in 2017 that "there are a few books of mine that I have written since then that I don't think I could have written had it not been for that encounter". When Glück was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Tóibin