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.
We’re buzzing -
here’s our shortlist!
Wednesday, 15th April, 2026 - we’re thrilled to announce the poets who have been shortlisted for publication later this year by Dithering Chaps:
Claire Booker — Twenty Tides
Hilary McDaniel — The Hoosier Sonnets for James Dean
Marie Macri — Contraband Fire
Tom McLaughlin — In Rooms of Falling Rain
Victoria Spires — Songs of Other Names
Chosen from their ten-page submissions, these five stayed with us: poems we returned to, questioned, thought about and admired.
We’ll be reading their full manuscripts over the next month and announcing our chosen poet on 13th May.
Until then, join us in celebrating the shortlist.
Announcing our April 2026 longlist
Wednesday, 8th April, 2026 - we are delighted to announce the twenty longlisted poets from our October 2025-March 2026 reading period. Just press play on the little film we’ve made to celebrate.
Congratulations to each of you! We now have difficult decisions to make about who to shortlist next week - a period of ‘peak dither’ for us, but it’s always a pleasure to reread your words.
We have read thousands of poems over the past six months and we’ve been amazed and delighted by the consistently high quality of the writing we have received. If your submission was not successful on this occasion, we hope you’ll think of us as you build your next chapbook-worthy collection. It’s been rewarding to hear back from many of you that the feedback we provide on each submission has been helpful in moving your poetic practice forward.
For those of you yet to submit, please bear us in mind over the coming months. Our April-September 2026 reading window is now open and, remember, if you’ve never had a collection published before, in addition to our end-of-September cut-off, your submission will also be considered for our First Collection category.
Dithering Chaps press longlist for April 2026
New additions to the publications schedule
Wednesday, 11th February, 2026 - Dithering Chaps is proud to devote one of our annual publication opportunities to the work of poets who have not had a poetry collection published before.
After careful consideration of the submissions from 2025, we’re thrilled to announce that we have selected:
BRIDGETTE JAMES, an emerging poet with a striking, intimate voice
and
LEANNE MODEN, poet, performer, storyteller.
Leanne and Bridgette were chosen for the lyrical beauty of their work, its emotional resonance, and the clarity of their creative vision. Their chapbooks will be published in 2026 by Dithering Chaps.
It is a testament to the quality of our shortlist that we chose two (we'd have loved to have chosen all five!), and we'll be posting more about them in the coming days.
Follow us here for updates. We can’t wait to share their work with you!
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 category of poets who have not had a collection published before