Over the Road: an original work by Peter Olds

By Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha | Dunedin UNESCO City Of Literature | Posted: Tuesday Oct 28, 2025

With 10 illustrations from woodcuts & a portrait of the author by Wayne Seyb (Cold Hub Press, October 2025)

‘I first met my mother as soon as I was old enough to tell the difference between her and the butcher. I’d just graduated from a course in jukebox maintenance, and was still smarting from a recent break-up with my girl-friend. I left home the day my pocket money was stopped.’

An irreverent portrait of the artist as a young man, this remarkable comic memoir in ten short chapters by the late Dunedin poet Peter Olds reverberates with echoes of Jack Kerouac's classic Beat novel On the Road. A relatively rare prose work by Olds, whose literary output was mainly verse, it was found unexpectedly, handwritten in a small notebook, after the poet's death in August 2023.

‘If Jack Kerouac’s On the Road defined a generation, Over the Road defines Peter Olds as an individual. Olds transforms himself into Jack the narrator, restless and provocative, observant and poetic, hitching from the deep south, heading everywhere and nowhere, searching for the great unknown. In this condensed memoirish-travel guide, he heads north, stopping at Mexico City and Jerusalem on the way. Not stopping at Gore.

From the V-8 engine of Olds’s literary imagination key people and places collide in a condensation of time. A fusion of fact and disguise.’––Jenny Powell

‘lively, satirical, deftly self-deprecating’––John Gibb

Order your copy here: Peter Olds Over the Road | Cold Hub Press