He died of tuberculosis six months later. I think the idea that the book’s completion killed him is only surmise on the part of the author here, but it’s both sad and amazing what George Orwell accomplished despite being sick.
From the 2009 article: [“‘I began to relapse about the end of September,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I could have done something about it then, but I had to finish that wretched book, which, thanks to illness, I had been messing about with for 18 months and which the publishers were harrying me for.”
Working on the Hebridean island of Jura in the cold and damp, the worst possible climate for tuberculosis, Orwell had produced a manuscript illegible to anyone save its author.]
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 