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 Times Literary Supplement. 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 has also written restaurant reviews for The Sunday Telegraph. 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". 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 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." In 2014, she defended the social policy legacy of former Labour prime minister Tony Blair and denounced those calling him a war criminal, and has strongly condemned the rule of Fidel Castro in Cuba. She sometimes covers feminist issues in her columns, and is a supporter of Humanists UK. She is the author of Bring It On, Baby: How to have a dudelike pregnancy, a book of advice for mothers-to-be, which was republished in 2012 as What Not to Expect When You're Expecting. 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". She was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2012 and was named Columnist of the Year 2010 at the WorkWorld Media Awards.
Criticism
In February 2020 Williams was criticised online and in Nation.Cymru for her comments about the Welsh language. Her exercise article 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." Williams had however previously praised the language for giving Welsh speakers "a more internationalist outlook".
Personal life
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.
