Williams was educated at the independent Godolphin and Latymer School for girls in London and read modern history at Lincoln College, Oxford.
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.
"[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.
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.
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.
[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.