Joachim Sartorius is a former head of the Goethe Institute Worldwide. Since 2001, he has been the Director General of the Berliner Festspiele.
Sartorius has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Budapest Collegium, and was elected a fellow of the German Academy for Language and Literature in 2002. He has translated the collected works of Malcolm Lowry and William Carlos Williams, and Atlas der neuen Poesie (1995), the highly-regarded international poetry anthology.
Sartorius was awarded the Paul Scheerbart Prize for his translations of contemporary American poetry. His own poetry has been collected in six volumes, the latest of which, Hôtel des Étrangers (2008), is available in English, Spanish, French, Greek, and Arabic editions.