Genre literature helps us to ask ourselves questions about aspects that define us as human beings. Perhaps for that reason, maternity is one of the most recurrent themes in incursions into fantasy genres  by renowned realist authors. By doing the unexpected and using antagonistic subgenres, Martí Domínguez and Marta Marín-Dòmine have just won two of the country’s major prizes, with novels that dissect the pros and cons of maternity. In Mater (Proa Novel Prize), Domínguez offers a near future that reflects on the human condition, which the author defines as an “ode to maternity”.  In that society, gestation occurs outside the female body. And so, when the protagonist discovers she is pregnant, she decides to run away and hide in a little colony that shuns scientific progress. Meanwhile, in Diré que m’ho he inventat (Sant Joan BBVA Novel Prize), Marín-Dòmine defies the codes imposed on something that has always been seen as unquestionable: the love between mother and daughter. The result is an intimate but universal story, with Gothic undertones; a lucid reflection on who we are and what we transmit. The cultural journalist Josep Lambies will lead the way in this conversation concerning the most profound questions surrounding the human condition.