News 2025
News from Dithering Chaps Press from 2025
Dithering Chaps press is an independent UK poetry chapbook publisher.
Here are our publication announcements, shortlist updates, event details, awards news, and behind‑the‑scenes revelations from our small press for 2025.
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.
This is the BBC World Service…
Friday, 26th December, 2025 - this has been the year that kept on giving for Dithering Chaps:
three stellar publications;
our first Rubery Prize nomination;
a great local Open Mic fundraiser for a local charity;
and now…. we’ve ticked something off our bucket list that we didn’t even know was there: a live slot on the BBC World Service, featuring Christopher James, talking about ‘The Ice Sonnets’ and all things Shackleton!
We’ve already had orders from the USA and Spain from listeners who were spellbound by the story behind the poems (two of which feature on the programme).
Our publisher’s lunch with Ceri Morgan
Thursday, 11th December, 2025 - what a joy to meet up with Ceri Morgan, whose stunning collection ‘Unstuck’ is due for publication in August 2026.
Ceri is a québéciste (Quebec Studies Scholar), whose poems have roots going back to the Beat Generation and are informed by feminist theory and practice in Québec.
The three of us had so much to share over our ‘publisher’s lunch’, and we were really excited to learn that Ceri aims to expand her original submission with new poems over the coming months.
It is an editor’s dream to be able to work alongside such a distinguished figure in her field as she conveys her academic sources of inspiration (shaped by spatial theories and practices, including urban studies, rural geographies, psychogeography, geopoetics, environmental storytelling, and nature writing) into her evolving poetic practice, combining flow and fragmentation in exhilarating ways!
Our Pushcart Prize Nominations 2025
Monday, 1st December, 2025 - it’s always a pleasure to select our favourite poems for the year. That said, it’s almost impossible for two innate ditherers to make the selection. Here are our six:
From Helen Kay’s, Rubery-shortlisted, ‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’ - Scrabble
From Nicole Durman’s ‘Ghosts of Nightshifts Past’ - Hands
From Christopher James’ ‘The Ice Sonnets’ - The Baptism
From Wimborne Stanza’s ‘Poems from the Old Squash Court Café’ - Winter’s Still by Maggie Alexander; Fog by Sarah Barr and Anagram by Dave Martin.
The Ice Sonnets - Publication Day
Monday, 1st December, 2025 - it’s Antarctica Day and what better date to publish Christopher James’s enthralling sonnet sequence, ‘The Ice Sonnets’?
We are holding a Zoom Launch on Thursday 11th December - please drop us a message if you would like to attend.
‘The Ice Sonnets’ - available now from our shop by clicking here …
Our choice: ‘Unstuck’ by Ceri Morgan
Wednesday, 19th November, 2025 - we are pleased to announce that, after carefully considering our five shortlisted poets, and much trademark dithering, the poet we will be publishing next May is Ceri Morgan, whose innovative collection, ‘Unstuck’, ticked all our boxes.
Form mirrors emotional state: a mind unstuck from linearity. ‘Unstuck’ is a portrait of psychological unravelling and tentative reassembly, where the cultural primacy of English is gently challenged through the introduction of other languages and modes of living.
We’ll be posting much more about Ceri in the months to come. We can’t wait to get into full editorial mode to bring you her work.
Many thanks to all of you who submitted during our April to September 2025 window. We read thousands of your poems, and it’s wonderful to see how vibrant the poetry community remains. We love to see how the feedback we provide to each poet who submits their work is helping them shape and further improve.
For those of you who have submitted to us this calendar year, and who have yet to have a collection published, look out for our next shortlist in early January. One of these poets will be published by Dithering Chaps next Summer.
Our October to March 2026 submission window is now open. We look forward to reading your poetry!
You are invited …
Thursday, 4th December, 2025 - Dithering Chaps is proud to announce the publication and launch of The Ice Sonnets, a new poetry collection written by National Poetry Competition winner Christopher James.
The Ice Sonnets retells the dramatic story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to cross the Antarctic continent in the early 1900s, through sharply observed poetry and pencil sketches by the poet himself.
Publication is on 1st December, which is, appropriately, Antarctica Day, in time for the holiday season. This chapbook will be the perfect stocking filler!
The launch takes place on 4th December, online.
Please see our Events section for more details.
You can pre-order your copy here.
And here’s our shortlist …
Wednesday, 15th October, 2025 - we’re proud to announce our April-September reading window shortlist.
Ceri Morgan - Unstuck
Gabriel May - Trumpet on a Clear Day
Beth McDonough – Los Caprichos and the Agency of Blue Collar Angels
Eloise Unerman - a skeleton, finally
Sadie Maskery - Have You Tried Turning Off And On Again?
We couldn’t be happier at the prospect of reading each of these original and poetically-stunning collections in full. It’s going to be a very tough call for us to choose just one. Stay tuned for our winner announcement in late November!
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Announcing our longlist
Wednesday, 8th October, 2025 - we’re proud to announce our April-September reading window longlist.
We have read thousands of pages of your poetry since last April and, without any doubt, the standard was higher than ever. David found himself writing genuinely positive feedback to many poets who we were not able to include. Many thanks to all those who trusted us with your work.
Today, though, we celebrate the forty poets who made it to our longlist. Well-deserved congratulations to you all.
Our editorial team (Gena and David) will be having a long lunch over the weekend to choose our shortlist of five poets.
We’ll announce our shortlist on Wednesday, 15th October, and the poet we choose will be published in May 2026.
(P.S. We remain open for submissions. Our current window runs until March next year, and the chosen poets from this reading window will be published in November 2026).
‘The Ice Sonnets’: building a buzz with our Kickstarter campaign
Wednesday, 17th September, 2025 - two days ago, we launched a Kickstarter campaign for our next publication, ‘The Ice Sonnets’ by Christopher James.
We hit our target this morning! Thanks to all of you who have already got on board.
It’s important for us to stress that the purpose of the Kickstarter was not to raise funds to cover our own project costs - these are fully funded in advance. Our main aim was to help us gauge demand for the book and therefore size our print-run accordingly.
With that in mind, we’d love you to take a look at our Kickstarter page and, if you like what you see, make a ‘pledge’ to pre-order your copy today. (You can also select from other ‘rewards’, such as receiving a signed copy of the book or an original piece of artwork by the author. These are going fast!)
‘The Ice Sonnets’ will be available from November.
Kingfisher sells out… again!
Thursday, 4th September, 2025 - Helen Kay’s sparkling poetry collection has been flying off the shelf. (I’d like to say ‘literally’, but my co-editor, Gena, would raise an eyebrow!) We’ve nearly sold out on our second print-run and have just sent a new order in to our printers.
This is good news and we couldn’t be more happy!
We think the fact that ‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’ was short-listed for this year’s Rubery Poetry Award might have something to do with it - see our 1st July news item below. (We are v. proud of this achievement! So proud that we’ve ordered gold sparkly stickers to adorn future copies.)
Still, it is a reminder of how difficult it can be to judge likely sales of a book. It’s risky printing too many books and having boxloads of unsold copies under the desk. That’s why, for our next book, Christopher James’ ‘The Ice Sonnets’, we’ll be using Kickstarter to create a buzz about the book as well as to help us work out how many copies we will need to print…
We’re in the Echo…
Monday, 18th August, 2025 - a shout-out to the artistic talent behind our Dithering Chaps chapbook covers. They’re Jamie Truscott, a local artist who is so exciting to collaborate with.
We just had a working lunch with Jamie where we shared feedback on their first design ideas for Christopher James’ sonnet collection, ‘The Ice Sonnets’, which will be out in November. It was like sitting opposite David Hockney on his iPad, as Jamie conjured up a stranded boat in an icy wilderness, an oblique sun, white space with nothing to fill it but heroic explorers… or fourteen-line nuggets of poetry.
And Jamie just told us how excited they were that our press release about their previous cover - for Nicole Durman’s ‘Ghosts of Nightshifts Past’ - was featured in the Bournemouth Echo last June. Here’s the link.
Thank you, Jamie, for an inspirational lunch. Now, back to typesetting…
Breaking on BBC News…
Thursday, 24th July, 2025 - we launch today and BBC News has picked up the story.
‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’: shortlisted by the Rubery Awards!
Tuesday, 1st July, 2025 - a big moment for us as publishers (and for Helen Kay as one of our poets). Helen’s collection has been shortlisted for the Rubery (Poetry) Awards! Dithering Chaps is always proud to showcase our poets on social media and we do everything we can to promote our collections once published - including nominating them for publishing awards, like Rubery.
This is our first time on a shortlist and we are keeping our fingers crossed…
“This is impressive writing…”
[Rubery Award - judges’ comment]
Saturday, 12th July, 2025 - alas! Helen’s book did not win first prize. However, her book received some excellent feedback and we couldn’t be prouder to be shortlisted in such good company. Congratulations to the poetry winner, Yvonne Baker.
STOP PRESS Monday, 21st July, 2025 - Helen’s national success featured in her local paper - the Nantwich Nub News no less…!
Ghosts of Nightshifts Past - hot off the press!
Wednesday, June 25th, 2025 - it’s always exciting when the courier leaves a big box of freshly-printed books on our doorstep. It means we’re ready to launch another great poetry collection.
Nicole Durman’s ‘Ghosts of Nightshifts Past’ will be launching at Brendon Books, in Taunton, on July 24th.
If you can’t wait, or can’t get to Somerset for the big day, you can order your copy today…
“You don’t know what eternity is.
I’ve glimpsed it. Gripped its narrow handle.
The space of a moment between swallows.”
[‘Ouroboros’ - Ghosts of Nightshifts Past]
And the winner was…
Friday, May 16th, 2025 - we are proud to announce that the poet we have chosen from our October-April 2025 shortlist is … Christopher James, with his collection ‘The Ice Sonnets’.
Christopher has a formidable poetry bio: he has won the National Poetry Competition, The Bridport Prize, The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, and received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, he has previously published five collections, including Farewell to the Earth (Arc, 2011) and The Penguin Diaries (Templar, 2017). His most recent pamphlet is The Storm in the Piano (Maytree Press, 2022).
We had our initial meeting with Chris in June, and we can’t wait to get into the detail of this project. The clue’s in the title: The Ice Sonnets … a series of poems commemorating the crew of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-17).
There will be ice, endurance, Boy’s Own bravery and even the odd penguin - all conveyed with Christopher James’ unique mix of journalistic killer facts and poetic originality.
Coming in November 2025
from Dithering Chaps
Breathing new life into the mic…
Saturday, April 26th, 2025 - our Open Mic at the Goat and Trike was a stonking success. We filled the room with over fifty people and also packed our programme with a plethora of high quality poetry.
Many thanks to our headliner, Helen Kay, to Claire H The Poet and Mayu Rousant for helping us host, and to all the poets who showed up to showcase their talents.
We were proud to be supporting Vita Nova, a community arts project that is so dear to all creatives in our area, raising over two hundred pounds towards their current crowdfunder. (If you’re reading this, we hope you will support them too.) The poets from Vita Nova who performed on Saturday brought raw energy, true emotion and total authenticity to their words and their poems will live long in the memory.
Thank you all and Viva La Vita Nova!
Dithering Chaps, pictured with the Vita Nova poetry posse and their inspirational leader, Sharon Coyne (third from right).
Please support Vita Nova’s Crowdfunder!
Donate Here
Announcing our April 2025 shortlist…
Tuesday, April 15th, 2025 - Having carefully reread all our longlisted submissions, we found ourselves drawn to five outstanding poets whose voices demanded to be heard.
We are proud to announce our April 2025 shortlist:
Nell Farrell - Embroidery Noises
Christopher James - The Ice Sonnets
Leanne Moden - Ophelia of the Bathtub
Mara Adamitz Scrupe - the cartographer's graft
Natasha Kerry Smith - Infinite Jade
We can't wait to read each of their full collections and make our final choice (announcement due in early June!)
Remember: if you want to be considered for our current publication schedule, our submissions window is always open.
Go to our Submissions page, now!
Announcing our longlist…
Tuesday, April 1st, 2025 - Dithering Chaps has been open for submissions since last Autumn and, as those of you who follow us closely will know, we operate two reading periods: October-March and April-September. We select at least one poet for publication from each reading period.
Our October 2024 to March 2025 window has been our best one ever: so many poets have sent us submissions that showcase their craft, vision and, quite frankly, their star quality. It’s been an honour to read them and we hope the brief feedback we have given in response to each submission has provided validation for the skillsets on display as well as some food for thought about where to focus in future writing.
The longlist we are publishing today is of such a high quality that we will have our work cut out to choose just five poets for our shortlist. Nevertheless, that will be our focus for the next couple of weeks: rereading all those ten-pagers, comparing notes, choosing the poets who we feel would be the best fit for Dithering Chaps.
We expect to announce our shortlist on this page by April 15th.
Drumroll please! Here’s our longlist…
The Kingfisher has landed!
Saturday, 18th January, 2025 - We held our latest launch event, for Helen Kay’s ‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’, at the wonderful Nantwich Museum. The event was very well attended - standing room only for latecomers - and everyone was wowed not only by Helen’s vivid poetic diction but also by her thought-provoking and insightful self-commentaries.
Gena and myself did what we could, as editors, to sprinkle fairy dust (and cakes) on the event and everyone went home happy and inspired, in Helen’s words, ‘to seek their own kingfisher moments’ in their writing.
Thank you to the museum for hosting and we do hope you’ll continue to send us photos of this collection out in the wild…
The Poetry Book Awards - our 2025 entries have gone in…
Wednesday, 1st January 2025 - It’s exciting to enter a competition and we’ve sent three of our chapbooks off to one of the best!
The Poetry Book Awards is an annual, international book award given to the best poetry books produced by indie writers, self-published authors or books published by small, truly independent presses.
We have high hopes for our three entries:
Simon Bowden’s ‘Gifts of the Dark’
Helen Kay’s ‘It Was Never About the Kingfisher’
Louise Walker’s ‘From There to Here’
Good luck, guys. There may be better indie publications out there, but we’ve yet to read them…
