News at Eleven: Seamus Heaney, the English language's most-read

living poet, should surely, I thought, be digging a sod somewhere or debating poetry over a Guinness. And, even at 78, his fellow grand old man of letters, the Caribbean author Derek Walcott, would have looked more himself striding from the waves on to one of the St Lucian beaches evoked in his great poem, Osmeros.

But here the two friends were in southeast London, scruffy jackets, crumpled brief-cases at their feet, up to their ears in a project that in itself sounds like a game of Consequences: an opera adapted from Heaney's The Burial at Thebes, a version of Sophocles' Antigone, to be directed by Walcott and staged at Shakespeare's Globe.

from The Times: Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney take on The Burial at Thebes
also The Wall Street Journal: Putting Antigone's World in Context

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