Peter John Olds (2 June 1944 – 31 August 2023) was a New Zealand poet from Dunedin. He was regarded as being a significant contributor within New Zealand literary circles, in particular, having an influence with younger poets in the 1970s. Olds held the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship and was the inaugural winner of the Janet Frame Literary Award. During the 1970s he spent time in the community of Jerusalem with James K Baxter.

Olds left school at 15, settled in Dunedin in the mid-60s and began writing in 1966, completing a one-act play while he was employed by the Globe Theatre building stage sets. In 1968 he suffered a breakdown, and after spending time in a mental hospital, joined James K. Baxter at the Jerusalem commune, returning to Dunedin in 1971 in order to write his first volume of poetry, Lady Moss Revived (1972). This was followed by V-8 Poems (1972), The Snow and the Glass Window (1973), Freeway (1974), Doctor’s Rock (1976) and Beethoven’s Guitar and After Looking for Broadway (1980). His published broadsheets include Exit: 2 Poems (1971), Schizophrenic Highway (1971), and The Habits You Left Behind: Poem (1972). He replied to his friend James K. Baxter's poem Letter to Peter Olds (1972) with his Doctor’s Rock.

Poetry Reading at Kaka Point was published in 2006, and In the Dragon Cafe, which features Letter to Hone Tuwhare in 2007. Under the Dundas Street Bridge, previewed as being "personal...the author takes us tripping down alleyways of his own confusion: waterbottle in backpack, notepad in hand, stalking the town like an evangelist on a mission", was released in 2012. In 2014 You fit the description: the selected poems of Peter Olds was published. A review of the book by the publisher included an introduction by Ian Wedde.

Taking my Jacket for a Walk, a work completed by Olds in 2017, was translated into Spanish in 2020 by Dr Rogelio Guedea, a "Mexican-born poet, crime novelist and academic", who taught Spanish at the University of Otago where he became familiar with Olds' work. Guedea said that Olds was an important writer whose work deserved to be read more widely. He described Olds as having a "great critical sense of humour...[and was]...wonderful at capturing the absurdity of life". Olds was surprised and pleased with the outcome.

Sheep Truck and other poems (2022) is described on the publisher's website as "a collection of 29 new poems by veteran Dunedin poet Peter Olds. Subjects include flying, dental treatment, encountering Charles Bukowski in the Dunedin Public Library, and not wanting to get out of bed."

The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature notes that Olds was "considered a central figure to many younger poets in the 1970s because of his ability to incorporate rebellious detail of contemporary experience with music, drugs and the concerns and language of the street." When promoting a symposium to Olds in September 2019, the University of Otago published [that] "Peter Olds' writing has been important to poets and other readers of New Zealand poetry since the 1970s, bringing to the centre of attention the unidentified, unclaimed, the marginal, the dispossessed, the trespasser, but also the exuberant, the childish, the lively and the conversational."

David Eggleton has said of him as a poet:

Olds is a master of laconic comedy, offering us delicate absurdist perceptions robustly expressed: childhood winter mornings in an antiquated Christchurch, a portrait of his father as 'a clergyman sitting up in bed ... rolling a racehorse cigarette', a glancing view of a dog described as ' a walking/ chucked-out bargain-basement carpet'...Olds weaves a consciousness of the moment into a personal mythography.