This, the fifth supplement to The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, extends up to 2008 and, like earlier supplements, includes material overlooked in the past. When other work by an author has been discussed before, we have added a parenthetical reference: NAE for The New Arthurian Encyclopedia and the first two supplements, which were published together in the 1995 Updated Edition; AL 18 and 22 for the third and fourth supplements, which were published in Arthurian Literature XVIII (2001) and XXII (2005) respectively. (To assist users in locating entries, we are preparing a cumulative index of all the supplements; it will be published on-line by The Camelot Project.)

Although the spate of thematic anthologies of Arthurian short stories has waned since 2002, two other recent trends continue unabated: the proliferation of series and the opportunities provided by print-on-demand publishing. Bernard Cornwell, Rosalind Miles and Jack Whyte have brought their series to an end: Cornwell's Heretic (2003) concludes his Grail Quest trilogy; Miles's Lady of the Sea (2004) her Tristan and Isolde trilogy; Whyte's The Eagle (2005) his Dream of Eagles Cycle. Others, like James C. Work, Mary Pope Osborne and Gerald Morris, however, push on, and they have been joined by such newcomers as Sarah Zettel, Laura Anne Gilman and Gwen Rowley, though in some series the Arthurian element fades into the background as authors like Kinley MacGregor, Elizabeth Wein and T. A. Barron focus upon the adventures of descendants of Arthurian figures.

Publish-on-demand books, though they broaden the range of reinterpretations of the legend, suffer not only from the lack of editorial oversight, but from being too often over-long and over-earnest. The results, inevitably, are uneven. At the other end of the scale some of the best current Arthurian fiction is being written for younger readers by authors like Gerald Morris and Elizabeth Wein. In Canada, Kit Pearson's A Perfect Gentle Knight (2007) won several awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for best book of the year for young adults; and in the UK, Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur (2007) won the Carnegie Medal, the first Arthurian novel to do so since Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers (1959).