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.[4] Her father, Mark Williams, was a forensic psychologist;[5] he worked at Wandsworth Prison in London.[6] Her mother was a set designer for the BBC.[7] Her parents separated in 1976 and divorced 20 years later.[8] Williams has an older sister[9] and half- and step-siblings from her father's marital and extramarital[9] relationships. Williams said her father was a petty criminal because he committed insurance fraud.[5][10]
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."[14][15]
Political
In 2014, Williams defended the social policy legacy of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair and denounced those calling him a war criminal.[16] Following the death of Fidel Castro, Williams condemned his rule in Cuba, while imploring her readers to ignore his policies.[17] 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."[18]
Feminism
Williams writes about her personal life from a feminist perspective, such as her marriages,[19] motherhood, and her abortion.[20][21]
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.[13]
Awards
Williams was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2012,[22][23] and was named Columnist of the Year 2010 at the WorkWorld Media Awards.[24]
Broadcasting
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."[25] She has presented a radio documentary, Inside the Academy School Revolution, which Miranda Sawyer found one-sided and "tame",[26] and hosted BBC Radio 4's What The Papers Say. She has been a panellist on the BBC's Any Questions[27] and Question Time.[28]
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."[29][30] Williams had previously praised the language on Twitter for giving Welsh speakers "a more international outlook".[30][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, describing the incident as 'shameless non-compliance with rules that were introduced to protect all of us'.[33]. In 2026, she wrote about the incident again, without contrition.[34].
Personal life
Williams lives in South London with her second husband, Will Higham, and his daughter from another marriage, as well as her son, Thurston,[35] and daughter, Harper,[36] who were fathered by her first husband before she married him.[37] Williams married the father, a geologist,[38] of her son and daughter[39] in 2013, after ten years together, and wrote about the wedding from a feminist perspective in her column for The Guardian.[40][41] In 2018, after a divorce, Williams married for the second time.[37]
Williams became a trustee of the Butler Trust[42]—which was established to recognise the achievements of prison service staff—in November 2013.[2]
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