Zoe Williams | |
---|---|
Born | Zoe Abigail Williams 7 August 1973 [1] Hounslow, London |
Education | Lincoln College, Oxford (BA) |
Occupation(s) | Journalist, columnist, author |
Employer | The Guardian |
Children | 2 |
Zoe Abigail Williams [2] (born 7 August 1973) [3] is a Welsh [4] columnist, journalist, and author.
Zoe Abigail Williams was born on 7 August 1973 in Hounslow, London. Williams was educated at the independent Godolphin and Latymer School for girls in London and read modern history at Lincoln College, Oxford. [5] Her father, Mark Williams, was a forensic psychologist, [6] [7] and her mother was a set designer for the BBC. [8] Her parents separated in 1976 and divorced 20 years later. [9] Williams has an older sister [10] and half- and step-siblings from her father's marital and extramarital [10] relationships. Williams said her father was a petty criminal because he committed insurance fraud. [6] [11]
Williams is a lifestyle, wellness and political journalist for The Guardian , with her Fitness in your 40s, family and political columns. Her work has also appeared in other publications, including the New Statesman , The Spectator , NOW Magazine , [12] the London Cycling Campaign's magazine London Cyclist, and The Times Literary Supplement . [13] She is also a columnist for the London Evening Standard , for which she was a diarist writing about being a single woman in London. She reviewed restaurants for The Sunday Telegraph magazine. [14]
In May 2011, Williams wrote about fare dodging when in her 30s while travelling on London buses. She wrote: "I actually had a lot of affection for bendy buses, mainly because evading your fare was so easy that to pay was almost missing the point. We used to call it freebussing." [15] [16]
In 2014, Williams defended the social policy legacy of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair and denounced those calling him a war criminal. [17] Following the death of Fidel Castro, Williams condemned his rule in Cuba, while imploring her readers to ignore his policies. [18] In August 2015, Williams endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election. She wrote in The Guardian: "The point is, Corbyn doesn't have to be right about everything; he doesn't have to be certain, and fully costed about everything; he doesn't even have to be responsive and listening to everything. This political moment is about breaking open the doors and letting the 21st century in." [19]
Williams writes about her personal life from a feminist perspective, such as her marriages, [20] motherhood, and her abortion. [21] [22]
She wrote Bring It On, Baby: How to have a dudelike pregnancy, a 2010 book of advice for mothers-to-be, which was republished in 2012 as What Not to Expect When You're Expecting. [14]
Williams was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2012, [23] [24] and was named Columnist of the Year 2010 at the WorkWorld Media Awards. [25]
Williams has appeared as a guest on television. Clive James praised her appearance in documentary Teenage Kicks: the Search for Sophistication: "The brilliant journalist Zoe Williams did a short piece to camera that was almost an aria." [26] She has presented a radio documentary, Inside the Academy School Revolution, which Miranda Sawyer found one-sided and "tame", [27] and hosted BBC Radio 4's What The Papers Say . She has been a panellist on the BBC's Any Questions [28] and Question Time . [29]
![]() | This article's "criticism" or "controversy" section may compromise the article's neutrality .(September 2022) |
In February 2020, Williams was criticised online and in Nation.Cymru for her comments about the Welsh language. Her article on exercise criticised a particular Canadian fitness regime as "hard and existentially pointless", continuing: "all that energy spent, no distance covered: it's like eating cottage cheese or learning Welsh." [30] [4] Williams had previously praised the language on Twitter for giving Welsh speakers "a more international outlook". [4] [31]
In 2020, Kent Live reported criticism of Williams following an altercation that resulted in Williams being told to leave a Wetherspoons pub in Ramsgate, on the basis that she had broken the COVID-19 lockdown rules then in force. [32] Williams had written about the incident in The Guardian. [33]
Williams lives in South London with her second husband, Will Higham, and his daughter from another marriage, as well as her son, Thurston, [34] and daughter, Harper, [35] who were fathered by her first husband before she married him. [36] Williams married the father, a geologist, [37] of her son and daughter [38] in 2013, after ten years together, and wrote about the wedding from a feminist perspective in her column for The Guardian. [39] [40] In 2018, after a divorce, Williams married for the second time. [36]
Williams became a trustee of the Butler Trust [41] —which was established to recognise the achievements of prison service staff—in November 2013. [2]
She is a patron of Humanists UK. [42]
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