As our current ‘plague year’ continues with exciting new variants, Angela Keogh, author of ‘plague novel’ The Winter Dress - which was short listed for last year’s Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair (2020) - offers a detailed account of the history of the Black Death in Ireland. The bubonic plague arrived in the country in 1348 while in the process of killing half the population of Europe. It had a similarly devastating effect on Ireland.