Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams (born 1973) is an English columnist, journalist, and author.

Williams attended the independent Godolphin and Latymer School girls' school and read Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford. Her parents separated in 1976 and formally divorced 20 years later.

Williams writes political commentary, interviews and reviews for The Guardian and the New Statesman. Her work has also appeared in other publications, including The Spectator, NOW Magazine, the London Cycling Campaign's magazine London Cyclist, and the London Evening Standard where she contributed columns on a variety of subjects and a diary about being a single woman in London. She has also written restaurant reviews for The Sunday Telegraph.

Williams has also 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". She has presented a radio documentary Inside the Academy School Revolution, which Miranda Sawyer found one-sided and "tame", and hosted BBC Radio 4's What The Papers Say.

In May 2011 Williams admitted to 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."

Williams describes her political views as left-wing and feminist. In 2014 she defended the social policy legacy of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair. She sometimes covers feminist issues in her columns, and is a supporter of the British Humanist Association.

She was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2012. She was named Columnist of the Year 2010 at the WorkWorld Media Awards.

She is the author of Bring It On, Baby: How to have a dudelike pregnancy (2010), a book of advice for mothers-to-be, which was republished in 2012 as What Not to Expect When You're Expecting.

Williams lives in Camberwell, South London, with her husband. Williams married the father of her son and daughter in 2013 after ten years together and wrote about the wedding from a feminist perspective in her column for The Guardian.