Francis Fox best villain award leads Tuula Pere children’s book honors
Tuula Pere’s Francis Fox series won Outstanding Creator Awards honors for stories about corrupt power, disinformation and civic ethics.
By Daniel Okafor · Business Editor
3 min read
The Outstanding Creator Awards named Francis Fox best villain in its Spring 2026 contest, putting a children’s picture-book politician at the center of a set of publishing honors. The character appears in a six-book series by children’s author Tuula Pere that uses animal-town plots to introduce election fraud, false media narratives, vanity projects and public ethics to young readers.
Francis Fox is the recurring antagonist in books illustrated by Andrea Alemanno and published by WickWick. Across the series, he manipulates local leaders, runs a dishonest mayoral campaign, seeks attention through building projects and uses a television channel to spread invented stories about a rival.
The newest book, The Fox and the Garbage War, also received first-place recognition in Best Children’s Book of Spring 2026 and Animal Literature. The awards also recognized Linda Lupo and William the Wolf from the book as winners for Best Supporting Character.
What is the Francis Fox series about?
The Francis Fox children’s book series follows a self-serving small-town politician whose schemes test the judgment and trust of his community. The books place adult civic problems in an animal setting, without naming a country, political party or public figure.
The six titles are The Fox’s City, The Fox and the Election Fraud, The Fox’s Palace, The Fox’s Tower, The Fox’s New Channel and The Fox and the Garbage War. Their recurring themes include ambition, corruption, disinformation, status built on deception and the need to question claims made in the name of progress.
Pere said her aim is to write about difficult subjects with care for children. “The weakest people need the most capable defenders, and the most challenging topics must be written with the most sensitive hand,” she said.
Which awards did Tuula Pere win?
The Outstanding Creator Awards gave Pere an Ultimate Championship Trophy for The Fox and the Garbage War and The Hermit’s Hut. The Hermit’s Hut also placed first in Writing and Publishing and in Motivational and Inspirational Books, while Francis Fox received honorable mentions in Best Character for both The Fox and the Garbage War and The Hermit’s Hut.
The awards’ Best Villain result singled out Francis Fox from The Fox and the Garbage War. In that story, Francis responds to an election loss by pursuing a waste-to-fertilizer project that frames personal attention and false progress as public benefit.
Literary Titan described The Fox and the Election Fraud as a witty treatment of political manipulation and greed, and characterized The Fox’s New Channel as satire about modern media culture. The same publication wrote that The Fox and the Garbage War could prompt conversations with children about honesty, leadership and questioning troubling claims.
Pere’s background in law and publishing
Pere came to children’s publishing after a career in law and corporate communications. She earned a law degree in 1984, later worked as a corporate lawyer and held senior communications posts at Finland’s Alko Group and Metsa-Serla.
She published her first children’s book in 2010 and completed a Ph.D. in Law at the University of Helsinki in 2015. Her dissertation examined the limits of freedom of speech in Finnish mass media during social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s.
More than 80 children’s titles have followed. Her other work includes the War and Peace picture books, the Pearl series selected for the International Board on Books for Young People with Disabilities’ 2021 list, and The Healer Cat, which is published in 101 languages.