Latest News
Latest News from Dithering Chaps
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.
Wednesday, 7th October: Thank you to everyone who has submitted their work to us since last April. It's been a pleasure and an honour to share in your sources of inspiration and creativity.
Choosing our longlist is an important moment, though it's tough, and a little sad, to have to let so many fine poets go.
We always enjoy the moment when we 'compare spreadsheets' to see how we have ranked the poets in our submissions pile.
We're generally pretty much in synch about who we love the most, but, every time, there are a few surprises and one of us goes back, reads again, and says 'you know what, you're right'. (It's usually David!)
Here are our top twenty..
Announcing Our October 2026 Longlist
We'll be announcing our shortlist of five on Wednesday 14th October. Good luck everyone!
Gestating Creatures
Saturday, 3rd October - we were proud to participate in the launch of 'Gestating Creatures' by Bridgette James, held online, with participants from both the UK and overseas.
Gestating Creatures is Bridgette James’s debut collection and she was the first poet to be chosen in our First Collection category. As soon as we read it, we knew we had to publish her work.
It is a formally daring, unflinching sequence of poems exploring fertility, endometriosis, pregnancy loss, IVF, the body under medical care, and the weight of cultural expectations on Black British and Sierra Leonean women.
If you would like your own work to be in the running for our First Collection category for 2026, please consider sending us your submission before the end of the year - full details on our submissions page.
‘The Ice Sonnets’ wins Second Prize
in the Maya Poetry Book Awards 2026!
Tuesday, 15th September - congratulations to Christopher James! ‘The Ice Sonnets’, published by Dithering Chaps last year, has been awarded the Silver Award in The Maya Poetry Book 2026 Awards.
We’ve been patting ourselves on the back non-stop since we heard. It’s a massive boost for a small press like ours to receive such external validation and, along with Helen Kay’s shortlisting for the Rubery Poetry Awards last year, makes us feel that we are truly making our mark.
Maya is open to poets from around the world, and welcomes submissions that push boundaries and reflect the rich diversity of contemporary poetry.
If you haven’t heard the buzz around this book, ‘The Ice Sonnets’ brings together Christopher James’ distinctive voice and artistic skills in a sequence that explores themes of heroic courage and resilience in the face of life-threatening risks.
Congratulations to the overall winner, Deborah Miller, for what must have been an outstanding entry, ‘Echoes of Silence’ and to Yvette Thomas, who came third.
Launch photos from ‘Unstuck’
Wednesday, 2nd September - we’ve just downloaded the photos from our latest launch event, for Ceri Morgan’s ‘Unstuck’, which took place last Friday at the King’s Heath Community Centre, in Birmingham.
We even went all Hay-on-Wye, with Lead Editor, David Herring, interviewing Ceri about her poetic practice and sources of inspiration. David got to read some of his poems too, alongside Dithering Chaps’ poets Helen Kay and Louise Walker.
We all got together afterwards to celebrate - David, Helen, Louise and Ceri are pictured below.
Congrats to kerry and Victoria…
Wednesday, 1st July - it was with great delight that, on opening the Summer edition of The Poetry’s Society’s Poetry News, we saw that a couple of poets we have shortlisted in the past year were among the six chosen for publication in the ‘Concrete’-themed Members’ competition. Congratulations!
Victoria Spires (on insta as @victoriaspires_poetry - photo on the right below) and kerry rawlinson (on insta and X as @kerryrawli - photo centre below) feel like poetry family. We have spent many hours in the company of their poems and it was wonderful to see their two new punchy and nuanced offerings.
If you were wondering how to catch our eye and ear with sonic bursts of poetic conceit, try on these two gobbets for size: ‘crack-whisperers that proliferate in concrete & metal.' [kerry] or ‘You told me all poets are fetishists, now I believe it.’ [Victoria]
As for our lead editor, David, he’ll just have to hope for better luck (and less talented competition) in the Members’ Autumn Competition, where the theme will be ‘Evolution’. Good luck to any of you out there who are planning to enter!
Photo Credit: Angharad Jones.
Photo Credit: Peri Cimen
A warm welcome to Tom!
Wednesday, 13th May, 2026 - we’ve chosen Tom McLaughlin’s stunning collection, In Rooms of Falling Rain, to publish later this year.
Tom’s work blew us away. Full of emotion inspired by the spaces we inhabit and the lives we live in them, from queer history's hidden rooms to the most private corners of grief and the body, this manuscript left us unable to put it down. It's the kind of collection that makes you want to call someone up and read a poem to them!
We can’t wait to start working with Tom to bring this collection to print.
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.
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…