Prawer was born on 15 February 1925 in Cologne, Germany, to Jewish parents Marcus and Eleanora (Cohn) Prawer. Marcus was a lawyer from Poland and Eleanora's father was cantor of Cologne's largest synagogue. His sister Ruth was born in 1927. The family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, emigrating to Britain.
1976: Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press
1980: Caligari's Children: the film as tale of terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press
1983: Heine's Jewish comedy: a study of his portraits of Jews and Judaism. Oxford: Clarendon Press
1984: A. N. Stencl, Poet of Whitechapel. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew studies. 1st Stencl Lecture
1984: Coal-Smoke and Englishmen: a study of verbal caricature in the writings of Heinrich Heine. London: Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London
1986: Frankenstein's Island: England and the English in the writings of Heinrich Heine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
1992: Israel at Vanity Fair: Jews and Judaism in the Writings of W. M. Thackeray. Leiden: Brill
1997: Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray's German discourse. Oxford: Legenda
2000: W. M. Thackeray's European Sketch Books: a study of literary and graphic portraiture. Oxford, New York: P. Lang
2002: The Blue Angel. (BFI Film Classics.) London: British Film Institute
2005: Between Two Worlds: the Jewish presence in German and Austrian film, 1919-1933. (Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context) New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books
2009: A Cultural Citizen of the World: Sigmund Freud's knowledge and use of British and American writings. Oxford: Legenda