News 2026
Latest News from Dithering Chaps Press
Dithering Chaps press is an independent UK poetry chapbook publisher.
We’re proud to share our latest publication announcements, shortlist updates, event details, awards news, and behind‑the‑scenes revelations from our small press.
We publish 30–60 page poetry chapbooks by contemporary poets and remain open for submissions all year round. If you’d like to submit your poetry to Dithering Chaps for possible publication, click here to find out how.
News items for previous years have their own pages.
The Ice Sonnets Makes it to the South Pole!
The Ice Sonnets Reaches the South Pole with Explorer Dwayne Fields
Wednesday, 7th January, 2026 - In a remarkable meeting of poetry and polar exploration, Dwayne Fields (adventurer, broadcaster, and the first Black Briton to walk to the Magnetic North Pole) has carried a copy of our chapbook, The Ice Sonnets, all the way to the South Pole.
Fields, whose work champions access to the outdoors for young people, set out on his latest expedition with a small selection of personal items. Among them was our chapbook: a slim volume of lyric meditations on ice, heroism, endurance, and the fragile beauty of polar landscapes. To know that these poems travelled with him to one of the most remote places on Earth is so satisfying for us, as their publisher, and for their author, Christopher James.
We’re deeply grateful to Dwayne for taking the collection with him, and for the work he continues to do, inspiring the next generation of explorers and readers!
If you’d like to order a copy of The Ice Sonnets, you can find it much closer. Just click on the link below.
Announcing our shortlist for poets without a previous poetry collection
Wednesday, 7th January, 2026 - we are proud that, at the heart of the Dithering Chaps brand, we are committed to giving at least one poet a year the chance of a début poetry collection.
We’ve reconsidered all the submissions received in 2025 from poets in this ‘previously unpublished’ category, and we’re pleased to announce a shortlist of five, plus ten highly-commended poets.
Watch out for our short films, in the coming weeks, featuring each poet on our shortlist.
We’d love to hear your thoughts…
The shortlisted and highly-commended poets in our Previously Unpublished category